Art of Fading Light

 As one of my few OMGAM microgames that actually has art, I wanted to give a little attention to it.

The game is about an interstellar starship that follows most of the constraints of our current understanding of physics, though it doesn't necessarily spell all of that out in the text.

The design of the ship its self is a kugelblitz or "black hole starship" design, first imagined by Arthur C. Clarke.  Hawking Radiation from a Kerr-Newman black hole is somehow harnessed and used to propel a rather mind-bogglingly massive ship between the stars at rather immodest speeds.

This is never spelled out in the game text, but it is implied when I describe the "endurance" of the ship as its travel lifetime as measured in gigaseconds.  The singularity at the heart of the ship's engine is constantly radiating energy, and will eventually run out.  This is some of the "Fading Light" hinted at in the title.

"Gigaseconds" gets re-used a lot in the text, as both a measure of time and of distance (light-gigaseconds), as well as an abstraction of fuel.  This is intentional; there is no practical difference between those things at the scale that the game emulates.  And the blending of time, distance, and lifetime suits the thematic nature of the game.

The very simple silhouette of the ship is a bit of vector art that I knocked together myself, but it was directly inspired by this render found at bisbos.com:

The diagram associated with the Bisbos render is more similar to what we might expect a fusion engine to look like, with the interesting addition of a particle accelerator ring.  For my silhouette, I replaced the ring with a solid sphere where we keep all of the "Endurance"

The implication is that this is where we keep our pet black hole, somehow containing a constant energy output best measured in mega-tonnes.

In true Atomic Rockets style, we put the payload bus up front where the ship keeps its mission cargo, and cap it all off with a conical shield to protect the vessel from collisions with interstellar dust at relativistic speeds.

These "Cultural Artifacts" represent another part of the titular "Fading Light".  As the ship takes on cargo and trades or spends it, they are dealing with artifacts from civilizations that you can watch progress, collapse, bloom, or explode into some sort of transcendent singularity.  The light of these civilizations is what you transport on the ship, and use to steer the progress of other civilizations.

The third and most literal meaning of the title, is in the news service which was discussed in a bit more detail in this previous post.

Looking at the graphic design of the pamphlet, I'm really happy with the consistent use of iconography.  I'm not sure how well this sort of approach would read in a longer text but, for the pamphlet format, I thought that it provided a pleasing level of consistency and information density without being too cluttered.

I feel that this game is absolutely packed with potential and, in broad terms, it is a concept I have visited a few times previously in various forms.  I'd like to update this with better art and layout, and a slightly more robust play-field.  For the first step though, expect a revision of the current rules in a more linear less tri-fold layout.