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Round 2 for the Light Bushido mech. got a pose now and the mask is more defined, kind of minotaury. I just asked if we can drop the cone hat idea and just have a more flat top, where you can stick an optional missile pod, so it's over the head instead of over the shoulder

Another thing I've been thinking about, is changing around the starter sets.. instead of 4 lights and 1 medium, it would be 5 lights. The team captain gets +1 to all stats, so he'll still be tougher than the rest.

Then we'd have medium mechs sold separately, and heavy mechs separate too. Each team would have several team captains, similar to Warmachine having different warcasters, each with different powers. We'd eventually do medium and maybe even heavy team captains too.

I'm thinking for retail we'd have the starter set, plus a blister/clamshell pack of 2 shooty lights, 2 melee lights, 1 shooty medium, 1 melee medium and then 1 box set for heavies where you can build 2-3 different versions. And then each team captain sold separately too. I'm not a fan of wall-hanging blister packs, but I guess it does make the most sense for minis, getting separate boxes made for every little release is pricey.

So for Team Bushido you'd get 5 mechs like the one above. The team captain will get the minotaur looking mask, the others will be more basic.

We're also going to lose the cone hat and leave a spot up top for an over the head missile pod, kinda like a space marine terminator with cyclone missiles.

So, I'm learning how to do 3D sculpts which I hope will save time (and money) later on down the line. Since I have sculptors working on Team Bushido and the Terran Titans, I decided to start with the Redsand Raiders (martians).

It will take me a while to get the first one down, but I'm making some progress. I made a different post under dakka's painting and modeling blogs to track my progress rather than clutter up this one. So far I have the legs done for the light mech, but still a long way to go...

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/569221.page

Wrong page link

http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/569221.page

ha.. oops, thanks

So I have Bob Naismith finalizing the Team Bushido starter set. It will be 5 light mechs. They will pretty much all have Powerblades since that's their preferred weapon. Each starter set for each team will come with 2 melee oriented lights, 2 ranged, and a Team captain. So for Bushido the Captain will have a sword, blaster pistol, missile pod & booster jets. Melee mechs will be a sword, shield & booster jets and the other 2 pistols & boosters. Ranged will have a plasma gun and a railgun, both will be kind of like a rifle, with a powerblade bayonett and missile pods over their shoulders.

Dave Kidd is my new sculptor who will be doing the Terran mechs. Going to deviate from the concept art a bit and have the pilot inside a full cockpit instead of exposed, mostly so it will be easier to do the molds and stuff. The chainguns are going to have an ammo drum instead of ammo belt going around the back, also for molds. These will have the standard weapons that other teams will use too.

Bushido's weapons are a different style since they're more humanoid looking instead of mech looking, so they are wielded like pistols and rifles. The Nexus Guardians will be a similar style so they will probably share the same weapon bits. But also since they are more humanoid some of them might be more like a single piece sculpt with weapons and all, not as swappable like the more mechy mechs. Guess we'll see how it goes iin the final sculpts. The bigger medium and heavy mechs will have a lot more options though.

I'm still working on the Redsand Raiders mech and learning 3D sculpting as I go. I will probably have to wait until Dave gets the Terran weapons finished before I can finish mine, as they will be a universal fit that will need to be able to work with the redsand raiders, aphid swarmers and buccaneers. I'm trying to keep the amount of bits (and initial sculpts to pay for) lower by sharing them among other teams. They also won't change much since they're all the standard weapons approved for use by the Galactic Mechadrome League

So, I'm kinda torn.. trying to plan out the best way to structure the eventual Kickstarter campaign to get the most stuff unlocked if we don't get tons of funding. I'm expecting it to do about the same as the BWG campaigns, not planning on a goldmine or anything.

At first I was thinking it would be best to unlock each team's starter set. Since starters are going to be 5 light mechs, that would mean we would need to get a lot of funding (probably 40-50k) before we can fund the first medium mech. It would be great to generate that much, but I want to be realistic with my expectations. So now I'm thinking I should just focus on the first 2 teams, the Terran Titans and Team Bushido. The main funding goal would be to unlock both starter sets, then we move on to unlocking the medium mechs, then the heavy mechs, then the 3rd team's light, mediums and heavy and so on.

But I'm just torn because I'd also like to have the variety of having lots of different looking teams and mechs, but the way the game plays I think you really want to have mediums and heavies to have a fun game, at least that's how my own playtests went.

The campaign probably won't be till around March, but I want to decide now so I know which preliminary sculpts to focus on. So what would you rather see? 6 different team starter sets of just light mechs? Or 2-3 complete teams?

I think I would prefer to have complete teams and to get the other teams later.

Here's the next batch of sculpts for Team Bushido.. now you can see all the different versions and guns and stuff Still some minor tweaks left but they're almost done

Gonna be getting some custom dice made for each team, for the Kickstarter. Here they are.. Terran Titans in blue and Team Bushido in red. I think like BWG it will be a pack of 6 for $10, but I think I might offer them where you can get 6 of just 1 team, or 3 of both if you want.

I've been stuck for a while between if I want to have generic mech names so players can easily have 2 of the same model, or have each one be a unique character. I think now I'm going to go with the latter, and since each set will come with extra weapon bits people can easily make their own characters & mechs too. I was going to have it like where you would add in a "Leadspitter" mech if they want one with 2 chainguns for example, and you could have 2 or 3 Leadspiiters in your team. but now I think it'll be better if it's more like Leadspitter is the pilot's callsign.

So on that note, I'm also kind of torn... should I have the same pilot characters driving light, medium and even heavy mechs? So Leadspitter's light mech would just have 2 chainguns, but in a medium mech he might have 3 plus a buzzsaw to help in melee or shield generator. At first I was thinking a separate character would be for each mech and each weight class, but I was thinking it might be fluffy if there's a set amount of pilots in each team, maybe 10, and each one has their preferred loadout for each weight class... And I could sell full team decks too as print on demand through Wargame Vault for the folks that want to collect them all, but there would still be PDF cards like I have for BWG now.

So if I did that method, I think we'd have 5 pilot characters in the starter set, 3 new ones in light mechs, and 2 new pilots in heavy mechs. And eventually, maybe fluff it up more and develop custom paint patterns for each guy too. One pilot might like racing stripes, another one might want flame patterns or lightning bolts. I was originally going to do a gallery in the rulebook showing a different paint scheme for "home" and "away" games, but giving each pilot their own nascar-ish "heraldry" sounds like it could be fun too.

Here's the first shots of the Terran light mech sculpt



you can click for the gallery image and enlarge it if you want.

The little man is for scale, this one will be a bit smaller than the Bushido mechs, it's more like an oversized battlesuit. He'll be 25-28mm tall, the bushidos will be more like 32-35. Anyway, he'll have a bunch of weapon options and a couple of different poses too. He's still not finished, a bunch of detail still has to be added and we need to finish the different weapons.

Also, I've been doing some sculpting of my own. First I started messing with a martian mech, but since I'm a noob it didn't come out so well. So I decided to switch to terrain and put together some building kits. The first one I'm working on is a bunker. This so far is only about half done, I have a lot of detail to add. it will probably come in 2 halves cut down the middle, so you'd get 2 halves to build a bunker. And other kits will be modular so you could just add 1 half to have a doorway leading into a larger admin building or something like that. Anyway here's what I have so far

Another update for the terran light mech

here's the concept for the aphid heavy mech

Gonna be doing an update to the mech attributes, this is mostly just for how I'm designing the stats for each team. I'm going to put together team rosters for the rulebook and I thought this might be a better way to go to list out each pilot. So, each team's mech and weight class will have the same stats, right now if you make your own mech from scratch you just get 10, 15 or 20 points to raise attributes however you want for light, medium or heavy. Now it will be 5 points less, so lights have 5 points, Medium mechs have 10 and heavies have 15. Then each pilot will have 5 points that add to whatever the mech's base stats are. So while a team's mech stats won't change except for more points depending on the weight, the pilots will all have different attributes. The cards will have the math already done, but in the team roster it will be broken down more.

So I'm thinking it would be something like this

Terran Titans Light Mech - Pwr: 2, Spd: 2, Eng: 2, CPU: 2, RC: 2, MC: 1
Terran Titans Medium Mech - Pwr: 3, Spd: 2, Eng: 3, CPU: 3, RC: 3, MC: 2
Terran Titans Heavy Mech - Pwr: 4, Spd: 3, Eng: 4, CPU: 3, RC: 4, MC: 3

Pilot A - Pwr: 1, Spd: 1, Eng: 1, RC: 1, MC: 1
Pilot A in a light mech - Pwr: 3, Spd: 3, Eng: 3, CPU: 2, RC: 3, MC: 2

Every pilot will have different stats that get added to the base mech stats, and each pilot has their own standard weapons and upgrades they always use, but I think the only pilots that will get printed cards for each weight class will be the team captains, just so I don't have to print a bajillion different cards. I might do PDF cards though with different pilots in different mechs and if all goes well I'd like to do an online team builder app too, later on. So I imagine in the app you'll pick the mech you want, and then choose from a list of pilots, or design your own. Then it will let you print out a single card, or combine everything into a whole team roster. And hopefully also have it where you can track your wins and losses against other players that also have the app. No idea how to do the programming for that kind of stuff though, so it's just a wishlist thing for me right now

More new stuff happened today. Been chatting with the sculptor about lots of different mechs that are planned and I came to the decision that it would probably be better to have the different styles of mechs be based on race, not on team. So, now, every human pilot in the game will drive a mech like the Terran Titans. Those earlier Bushido mechs I was showing on will be used for a different alien race later on.

So this means, since both the Terran Titans and Team Bushido are human-based teams, their mechs will all look the same, however they will come with different equipment. Terran Titans are more of a shooty team, so they will have more guns. Team Bushido is more melee oriented, and they will all come with Booster Jets for standard equipment, so they're all jump troops basically. So I guess it'll be kind of like space marines, where there's different color schemes and heraldry and playstyles for different chapters, same idea here. However, as teams grow and expand some will add other races to their ranks too. All this is mostly just going to apply to the first 2 starter sets.

So this also means, since the first 2 starter teams are going to be humans, they'll all have the same body, just different weapon loadouts and different color schemes. And then for the Kickstarter we'll have a much lower funding goal since I'll be producing 1 set of sculpts instead of 2 to begin with, and we'll be able to unlock the goals for the medium and heavy mechs and whole new races a lot sooner

And that leads me to the next pic.. Got the top missile pod turret done now, and also since the shoulder armor is going to be separate pieces, we're going to make different team emblems and other rank insignias and stuff like that

Another small rules update, I decided to remove equipment (Booster Jets, Shield Generators and Reinforced Armor) and make them upgrades instead, and after a lot of games and testing I decided to change the amount of weapons back to the original amount, 3 for light mechs, 4 for medium and 5 for heavy.

Also going to change heavy weapons to be where any mech can wield them, but they just take up 2 weapon slots, and you need a power of 4 or better to have one.

I have the updated rules more or less done now, I'm just waiting for the sculpts to get finished so I can use renders of the different weapon bits for the armory section in the rulebook, and renders of the mechs for the diagrams and stuff. So that should be around next week or so, hopefully.

The terran light mech is really coming together now that the weapons are getting done Here's a few shots with some new guns.

At the top we have a blaster pistol, missile pod and chaingun. The blaster pistol will probably be a swappable piece, so you can plug in melee weapons instead like buzzsaws, crusher claws or jackhammers. Or if the pieces are too teeny we might just make separate whole arms. Left & right versions of each of course.

Next comes an alternate chaingun design for when size matters, and a plasmagun. I might actually save the big chaingun for the medium mechs and the stubby one for lights, And at the bottom the boxy looking gun is the railgun



you can click the pic for the zoomable gallery version

So, I'm putting the rulebook together.. it's about 50 pages, digest sized. I still need to add a lot of art that I probably won't be able to do till after the kickstarter campaign. I'm kind of wondering what's the best way to handle the teams. Do a couple of pages as a fluffy bio? Make a team list with all 15 players for all 6 teams? Or something like a full page bio for each player? The latter I don't know if it's a good idea, because that will be 90 pages since I have 6 teams.. I mean I could, but that would crank up the page count which means it will be a higher price. I was hoping for $20 or $25, but that many extra pages could make it $35-40. I want to keep the rules as cheap as I can, since it's a new game and all. Some day in a couple of years if it has a good following I can look into doing a big hardback book, but right now I feel like that's too pricy for a game that's brand new and all.

in BWG, I don't list out any characters in the rules, it's just all in the cards. Since I was aiming for 80 pages for the rulebook, I was thinking maybe just a generic list that's 4 pages per team.. but then do separate team rosters that have a bio for every player and expanded fluff and painting guides and all that stuff, as a PDF or Print on demand book on wargame vault. Maybe 20 pages each. Would that be a better way to go, or would it be better to just add all of them to the main rulebook and have it all in 1 place, kind of like the way Privateer does it?

Nice to see this coming together so quickly for you.

Just as a wild tangent, have you considered writing new rules from the ground up instead of re-skinning BWG? Seems like a lot of Mech specific features and themes could be brought through with different mechanics, like what you see in Mech Attack or Battletech. What I mean is at the moment it kind of feels like the teams could still be made up with cowboys instead of giant robots.

Yeah, it's not an exact copy of the rules. It plays mostly the same, I guess you could kind of compare it to Warhammer fantasy & 40k. You'll still attack and defend them same way, but there's other differences.

In BWG you have professions. And when you activate you move 6" and then you can attack once or twice if you have 2 pistols.

In Mechadrome, there are no professions. You have an amount of actions equal to your Energy attribute, and then you can use those actions to move or attack or do other things. So if your energy is 4, you could move 4 times in a row, or shoot 4 times, or move, then shoot, then move, then shoot again. You move an amount of inches equal to your speed, so on average you'll only move 3 or 4 inches at a time. If you need to move 10 inches, you'll have to use a few actions to move the full distance.

And then there's other things like your mech can have booster jets that let you jump over terrain or up onto a roof, or shield generators that increase your shields (like defense) or extra armor to add to your HP.

New screenshots, here's some melee weapons Crusher Claw, Buzzsaw and Jackhammer



Next day or so I should get the siege drill arm done, and then the final poses, so on the minis they won't look like they're standing around bored. Then after that we'll get started on the medium mech

And another quick pic, here is the siege drill.


And Dave is starting on the poses now. mosltly just different leg positions. There will be 4 different poses so the starter sets can be all unique. Well, to start with there will be 5 light mechs in the starter sets, but in the Kickstarter when we unlock the medium mech stretch goal I'm going to have a bonus where every starter set automagically gets a medium mech upgrade for the team captain


Automatically Appended Next Post:
oh also I just got a nice bit of fluff for the rulebook too, so I'll be adding that into the preview rules. Planning to get that finished up and then I'll post em next week when I finish redoing my website (for the 800th time)

Got some new sketches today, these are the Light and Heavy mechs for the Bionic race & Nexus Guardians team. These are just quick sketches, not done yet, but this is the look we're going for





As usual you can click for the bigger gallery version

I made a high res group shot render and got a couple different angles. This is what will come in the Terran Titans starter set. You can click the pic for the bigger gallery version



I'm still waiting for 1 more alt body with a different leg position, and the Team Bushido and plain shoulder pads pieces then I can send them all off for printing

And here's the Medium mech for Bionic race The light will be similar, just no arms and more snake-like and the heavy will be even bigger and meaner that this one. All bionic mechs will also have built in melee weapons with their tentacle blades so the Nexus Guardians will be more of a melee oriented team, but there will still be a good amount of guns too.



I'm also going to be getting the aphid artwork redone, so they will be more robotic instead of organic, but still have the same general look. They'll be like robot bugs, I guess kind of like Necron tomb spiders or the cenitpede thingy from Forge World. I thought that would better fit the look & feel of the other teams

And even more art for the Bionic mechs. Here's the light mech



And here's the Heavy Mech



Next I'll be getting the Aphid mechs reworked to be robo-bugs rather than not-tyranids. So I should have that art done soon too.

Almost done updating my website .. here it is so far

http://gangfightgames.com/index2.php

I just need to finish the Mechadrome page, but I have the latest rules on there now if anyone wants to check it out. It's the pretty PDF that has art and stuff in it now rather than the plain text version I posted before. I just have to get the art added to the site and do pages for the different teams and then I should be set. Once that's done I'll start posting it around the web to try and build a little buzz leading up to the Kickstarter next month


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh also, here's the new version of the heavy aphid medium and light will be done soon

I am loving the biomechs also very keen for the 15mm card stock terrain.
Will you be doing non destroyed card stock buildings?

I will be following this project close sly.

LGW

I have a few plans for terrain. I still want to do the cardstock terrain since it will be cheap, but I think that might end up being a PDF that you can print and make yourself rather than a pre-printed set you can buy. But I might be able to do a print-on-demand version with Wargame Vault. We would do both complete and ruined versions of the buildings, and I'm also planning a road system based on 4" or 6" squares, so you could print out the squares you want and stick them together to make a city board layout.

I'm also planning physical terrain pieces that I think is going to end up kind of like a 15mm version of GW's Cities of Death or Deadzone tiles, so it will be all modular wall pieces you can stick together to build just about any kind of building. At first I was going to do these in resin, but I will probably be working with Proxie models to get them done in good ole fashioned plastic. But it will likely take a while to get all that put together so I don't think it will make it into the Kickstarter next month. We do have some other Proxie kits that we'll be selling though as add-on items...namely the 15mm ruined brick buildings and possibly scaled down versions of some of their 28mm terrain. The modular wall panels will probably end up being a separate campaign for later this year.