Being the rookie that I am – actually less than that – I am bouncing back and forth and slamming against two doors that lead to different places with the objective of the design.
If one of the doors leads to a purely engagements oriented design, the other door opens the proposition of context of why those engagements would happen.
As part of the process I set myself to recreate the map of the entire area of operations and allow myself a bit of focus on doing the game board graphics – the software allows for zooming any specific area I wish to focus later on if I don’t want to design for the entire region and will re-create and generate the coastlines, so by having that done makes more good than bad.
While i’m painting, digitally, the mind travels and tries to focus on what is important for me to achieve with the design and I cannot make the game about everything, I must focus and going operational means the tactical will have to be simplistic, and the other way around as well.
Another option would be to adopt a “Captain Perfect” solution and make the tactical game and the campaign companion ( or the other way around ) as separate games but connected.
For this reason I stopped the intricate ship to ship tactical for a bit and trying to model a credible but rather uncomplicated tactical board for fast resolution of encounters to be used with an operational design.
Given it is about the grand age of fighting sail I take inspiration in Tic Tac Toe and positioning of X and O.
See you in 2022.
wargamer.coffee.break 