Game Development Continued…

So John Haward came to me with a cool proposal: start exploring the Minor Factions and the primitive leviathans and technology they’d be fielding. I thought it was a very cool idea, and so he and I are slowly kicking it around and seeing what we can come up with. (He’s doing most of the leg work and then he sits around waiting for me to review and comment…)

Now in the Leviathans Primer we discuss what Minor Powers have what ships…but it’s only in the broadest terms. Instead there’s a lot of fun potential to explore there if we start to flesh this area out.

For example I’m looking at a cool spreadsheet that John’s put together for his proposal on how to break things down.

He’s broken the development into a proposed five time periods:

Period 1: roughly 1890-1895

Period 2: roughly 1896-1900

Period 3: roughly 1901-1905

Period 4: roughly 1906-1910

Period 5: (currently) post 1910

The spread sheet then goes onto have sections such as “Hull Construction”, “Maneuvering”, “Power Plants”, “Engineering” and so on. These all correspond to these time periods and take the extent ships we’ve published (along with the Customization rules from the Captain’s Manual) and devolve them into game stats we can use to build primitive leviathans to hand to the various Minor Powers: i.e. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, ottomans, Brazil, Argentina, Chile…and perhaps one or two others thrown in for good measure.

This will allow us to simultaneously flesh out the world setting even more than we have through the Major Powers, while also providing more fun and unusual ships and the scenarios to go with them. A great exercise in both universe and game building and one that we should be able to start bringing to the community in short order.

See ya next duty shift!

Randall