gimmicklabs posts
Posts: 33
Files: 2
The Design of BCS VIII: The Downtime Rules
The Downtime rules are only 3 pages and mechanically consist of a single Extended Action that spans the period between Episodes. Yet, they accomplish a lot with very little. With one Test you can repair your robot, spy on the enemy or write a book that connects with thousands all over the world and makes you famous. Th...
The Design of BCS VII: Operation Rules Odds & Ends
For today we've got a grab-bag of all the Operations mechanics leftovers, totaling 6 different subjects. That's a lot! So without further ado, let's get started.TerrainGiven that the game plays without maps, you'd think that there wouldn't be Terrain rules, or that they'd be barely relevant, and...
The Design of BCS VI: Operation Actions
In BCG there are 10 general Action types, not counting things like Combine, Restoration or Lightspeed Assault that are abilities which are their own Actions to use. Meanwhile in BCS there's 5 Primary Actions and 11 Secondary Actions, which can be combined a number of ways, giving you a ton more options every Turn.W...
The Design of BCS V: Operation Basic Rules
The rules for Operations are more than twice longer than those for Intermissions so we're splitting them into not two but THREE updates, because there's THAT MUCH to talk about here. Without further ado, let's get started.Operation StructureFor the first time in many editions and updates, the Operation Stru...
The Design of BCS IV: The Intermission Rules
Intermissions are a rather large part of the game. Often, the longest part of the game. They've always been rather simple on the mechanical side though, and BCS doesn't change that. It does improve how you play them, though.The general structure of Intermissions is the same. You roleplay until you run into some...
The Design of BCS III: From Pilot Levels to the Item System.
A.K.A. "The rest of the general rules overview."Pilot LevelsPilot Levels, renamed from Power Levels, now have a larger mechanical impact than they used to. Each Pilot Level offers 1 Ace Trick, 1 Ace Perk and a +1 to all Tests. With this, PL makes pilots switching mechs feel like you actually get to carry over y...
The Design of BCS II: The Core Mechanic
The Core MechanicThe most important change to how BCS works compared to BCG, along with the mapless play, is the new core mechanic. From Monsterpunk I learned that I strongly prefer degrees of success/failure to binary pass/fail resolution systems. However, BCS is a little bit different compared to other systems with d...
The Design of BCS I: Episode Structure
I'm starting a new series where I'll be going in depth on the design of BCS, in the vein of the old BCG Restrospective, but instead of doing it for a finished game it's for one that is still in development instead.We'll be going in the order that the content is presented in v0.1b. Because it's a bet...
I did not forget about Patreon
But I haven't had the time to write something this month. I've been thinking of going over all the mechanics in BCS a la the old retrospective series but the stars have been aligned in the opposite direction of me sitting down to write for a while. We'll get started on it next month, hopefully the beginning...
Introducing Battle Century S
Hello friends, rivals and assorted gentlepeople, don't mind me, I'm just going to drop the public beta of a whole new system at the same time that I'm announcing it.I've been holding to this baby and making small tweaks for a long while, and I've got quite a bit of storytime to share alongside the b...
My Top 5 Things I Like and Don't About BCGR
The thing I originally was going to upload this month could benefit from a few more days of prepwork, so in lieu of it I'm going to do something related, but a little bit different from the usual. In the vein of blog posts of old, and particularly of the BCG Retrospective, I'm gonna do a bit of game design chat...
Art Update for BC79
Barring any unforeseen bursts of sudden inspiration accompanied by a notable fiscal irresponsibility, this is the last art update for BC79. What could still happen is that I'll make a print version, which is enough of a pain and far removed enough from the design process that it's not something I'm interest...
More art! Plus, some design stories.
I've just updated the module with new art, which is a good opportunity to post an update about it, show that art off, and talk more about the campaign itself.This is the official AMB-01 Trawler art. Originally, it was going to be a much more practical design. A grungy, industrial-style landship puffing out clouds o...
Battle Century 0079 RC is out
It almost had to be pushed into August, but we made it to the July deadline! If only barely, and only for some timezones.We changed main artists. For the past 2 months the man who's been my main artist for 4 years has been unfortunately tied up with real life complications. Long story short, you'll see some art...
Still Waiting for Art
I just realized that its the end of the month and I haven't yet posted an update, so here I am. My plan for this month was to post the finalized cover, but, well, as the title implies, I don't have it yet.What I do have is the logo!I added the calendar era to the title to give it more of a UC Gundam OVA feel to...
Let me Tell you about BC79
The anthology is finished! It's currently sitting at 70 pages and 6 Episodes. I'm gonna take another month or two for the editing and proofreading process, and also to wait for art. By the way, the anthology has a name now: Battle Century 0079, or BC79 for short, named after the year the anthology takes place i...
April '23 Progress Report
Work on the anthology continues. One of the highlights of doing this kind of project, at least for my personal sensibilities, is that I get to make custom mechanics. Take these three Features, for example:Dogged DeterminationInternal Upgrade (0)Effect: You cannot use Default or Alternative Genre Powers other than Try A...
March '23 Progress Report
The rewrite is at 2/6 Episodes. I'll admit that I wanted to be further along by the end of this month, but it is what it is.For a little bit of context, on March 1 the power grid went down for half the country because one of the cables coming out of our largest nuclear power plant caught on fire. Then we spent the ...
Uncreeping the Scope
I've been slowly chugging at the Campaign Module. However, I realized it was being harder than expected, and that was early while I was still writing the simpler Episodes. Worse, a part of me kept saying it needed to be longer and have more Episodes, for pacing reasons, you see.The project was both growing out of c...
Introducing Gemini
One of the coolest things about publishing your own games, is that the homebrew content you make for a specific campaign is only an editing pass or two away from becoming official content.The Gemini System was originally going to just be a variant of the Allied Reinforcement rules, but those rules didn't do everyth...
December sure is December
As foretold by the prophecy, I don't have much to show this month. I wanted to show at least a new mechanic for the campaign I have almost finished, but I lost a hard drive to a power outage two days ago and it was the boot drive, so I spent an entire day getting the ex-slave drive in working order and that really ...
Let's Talk about the Campaign
So last month I promised a campaign scenario. Here's some numbers to give you an impression of what that'll be like: 9 Episodes. Each Episode consists of a short Intermission, an Operation, and a short optional post-Intermission Scene. 6 Introductory pages. If you've read Any Oasis in a Desert, the Monsterp...
Updated BCGR to v1.84
The updated version is out wherever it is that you get your files from. That's the final content update to the core book, but not the end of BCGR as a project. There are things left to do before I can call it fully complete, the first of them all being a premade campaign scenario.Whatever I make next for the game w...
October Progress Report
It's done! The last few illustrations are in and I've gotten in the last clarifications into the rules (if you're curious, the specific clarification is that shared/transferred Maneuvering bonuses are canceled if the recipient moves away or is moved away; this was implied in the writeups for the shield grun...
September Status report
"No news is good news" goes the saying, supposedly coined by James I of England.Clearly the king never felt obligated to give other people progress reports.Alas, no news is, indeed, bad news for us. The last pieces of artwork are taking longer to finish than expected, so unfortunately this is an update just to ...
August Progress Report
While all the new art is a great addition, the best thing about the decision to take most of the year to upgrade the book is just how many errors in the text I've managed to fix. Eight months, three game updates and two sets of proofreaders later, I'm still finding typos, double spaces between words, and the li...
BCGR v1.82 Update
All the relevant download sites have been updated, so here I am for the status/roadmap post!These are the final two high priority pages in need of filler art:P175: Faction Wealth Tests.P194: Solar Grid Energy, Religion, Law and Labor.Last month I said the next update would come when I had the art for those, but those w...
BCGR June Art Progress Report
This month's art goes for the Exemplar Themes pages, and it was the trickiest art to conceptualize so far.Exemplar Themes are for characters who represent an ideal, often gaining power from it, like GaoGaiGar's Guy Shishio whose G-Stone is powered by courage. These often work best when there's multiple char...
BCGR May Art Progress Report
Slow month, compared to earlier ones, but we did get some art. First, here's three portraits for the Phantasm and Phasing Skills page:I had the plan, a while ago, to show a Mycotypal human before and after using the gender change ability. For space reasons, I didn't get to add that to the corresponding lore sec...
BCGR v1.8.1 Update
I've just uploaded this month's update to both DTRPG and itch.io. In addition to the two pages I showed off in the last post, I filled a few additional pages with stock art (thank you leftover store credit) and wrote a few extra sidebars. I even expanded the NPC Contact table on the Lifepath section a little.Th...
