Work in Progress – October 2021

Development work has slowed a bit recently, but that’s because it’s getting harder to make improvements. All the easy fixes have been done, and what’s left is more a matter of refining. Here’s the state of things this month.

Heavy Weapons: 85-90% complete. This expansion has been prioritised, and the effort has paid off. I think it’s pretty much ready to go, with balance etc all working well. I still need to write up the rules and mission books (in other words, do the boring stuff), but that’s the biggest remaining task.

Squad Leaders: 75-80% complete. This has gone surprisingly smoothly, perhaps because I’ve been including the squad leaders in lots of other playtests. I’m still not sure that the balancing is right, but the expansion as a whole is in a pretty good place and I don’t foresee any major issues with it.

Equipment: 60-65% complete. Although I think everything here is working okay, it hasn’t received nearly as much playtesting as the previous modules. I’d like to see it all in action a fair bit more before I move it closer to a completed status.

Tactics/Orders: 55-60% complete. The same issues apply as for the Equipment module, with the additional issue that the content isn’t as intuitively easy to grasp. Once again, a lot more playtesting is needed for this module.

Mechs: 25-30% complete. I nearly didn’t include this in the list, partly because it needs so much work and partly because there’s so much to it that I’m not sure it counts as a module! In any case, this badly needs a lot more development time. I know what I want to do, but I’m not sure it’ll all work. This is the lowest-priority item, so I don’t expect it to progress much anytime soon.

Overall, though, things look pretty good. I’m becoming more and more confident that the module approach to expansions will work well. As I’ve fleshed them out, I’ve seen that there’s a good amount of content for each of them. I don’t think I need to worry about any of them feeling like a rip-off, and anyone who buys one will have plenty of new crises and opportunities to get to grips with.

As you can see, a major bottleneck for me is playtesting. I’ll go into more detail about that in another post.