Tri-fold Map to the Stars

My April 2019 micro-game submission for OMGAM also did triple-duty as a submission to the itch.io Pamphlet Dungeon Jam and Mapemounde.

This means that it is triple-packed with some rather clever things, but it also suffers quite a bit in the compromises it had to make to satisfy the criteria of length, format, and content.  Which is a bit of a shame, as I think there are some kernels of really great ideas in here.  I will probably provide an updated version in the near future, to add some traditional A4 sized PDF instruction sheets.

The basic premise of the game was inspired by Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds, and by the seminal sci-fi RPG Diaspora by VSCA.  The player is in control of a tramp space craft, traveling the stars at near-light speed by virtue of some sort of unspecified exotic engine.

The speed of light is a hard limit in this game, and by the time the player receives news of other worlds it is already decades out of date.  When the space craft plots its destination to a new star system, the very civilizations that it expected to be there may have evolved or collapsed before it arrives.

One of the difficulties in the bookkeeping for this, is keeping track of what news is available about each world, based on how far away it is.  Each time the space craft reaches a destination, the player must calculate the light-lag to each of the other worlds and then update the civilization progress of each of them — up to the limits of the light-lag.  When the player moves away from a world, news will seem stagnant.  When the player moves towards one, news will flood in and catch them back up.

Keeping track of all that is a bit of a faff, and I tried to simplify it with a clever feature that I owe entirely to the inestimable Adam Hegemier:  The game pamphlet can fold back on its self such that the culture and technology tracker for each world can line up with the star-chart as a sort of data-layer overlay:

The positive feedback that I received about this game all talked about how clever this little feature was, and I do love it.  In retrospect though, the whole thing would be better if it wasn't necessary at all.

I was cramming this feature in to achieve the information density that I needed on the tri-fold pamphlet, but frankly the game requires a little more luxurious use of space to clearly communicate the necessary ideas to the player.  The data boxes in the fold-over needed to be next to the explanatory text that tells the player how to use them.  And that little row of rings is a star chart that, for the purposes of play, needed to sit next to the ship diagram with all of the resources laid out in check-boxes:

In an ideal world, all three things and the explanation text could have fit on the same panel, but with a tri-fold A4 I had to make some hard choices and this is where it ended up.

I'll talk a bit more about the information presentation and iconography when I do the inevitable write up on the art and graphical design.  It is minimalist, but it worked out in a way that I'm overall pleased with given the constraints involved, though there are definitely some places to improve.