Entropy City: Making a Wargame

When someone says the words “motorcycle gang” theres a very specific group type that most people will think of and with shows like Son’s of Anarchy & Mayans M.C let alone seeing them in movies such as The Terminator has solidified the vision in pop culture and somewhat in immortality even if their influence on the world isnt as large today as it may have been in the 80’s & 90’s.

Well from a pop culture sterotype perspective thats what Hades is based on, the group itself evolved from that sterotype to a full on unique faction of their own. Hades are a group that started as friends feeling rejected by society following time in the service, overtime it grew to gather outcasts of all kinds, a real sense of family and belonging and pride comes from its “true” members, and atleast in their early days new recruits were chosen and put through a very thorough and rigoris trial to earn their place among the ‘family’.

Hades certainly hasnt been an innocent group but theres been plenty of moments in history theyve been blamed for that they claim to have taken no part in. In the case of the moment that caused the downfall of the city there was evidence of them not being involved but at that point those in charge reacted rashly and the warfare that folowed led to the city being in the state it is today..

The logo itself has evolved since the game was started a few years ago, especially as someone working full time and never having done this before Ive tried to keep updating things as often as I could but as proud as I was of the original placeholder idea which was the single fist it always felt like it was missing something and so I spent time trying to create something that felt like it could belong in the back of a riders leather kacket and thats where the 3rd image comes from.

Its worth noting that I myself am not an artist, its never been something Ive been comfortable doing and long term the plans would be for everything you’re seeing to be replaced hence why I call it ‘placeholder’. This particular image is something I started by tracing, the second fist is the first flipped around and edited and the fire comes from a tonne of difference sources simple because its intended to inspire.. Hopefully.

In the coming days I hope to give you an update on each of the current fleshed out factions, and yes I should give an update on the rules at somepoint as well.

One of the big untouched sections of the game for a long time has been the question of people on foot, what options will people have, in its earliest days my answer was simple “but I want this to be a bikes game” however as the actual development started in 2021 the arguments from playtesters and people following the project started to get more detailed and I began to see that if it was being asked for I should probably figure out a way and if it doesnt work then atleast I’ve crossed it.

Now for a long time thats as far as it had gotten, something for future Jason to worry about, lets get the bikes right first but Im reaching that point now where I feel if I dont start answering these questions it will become too late, I can start with some simple answers.

• If someone comes off their bike theyre removed from the game.
• If someone starts on foot then theyre an on foot miniature.

I feel too many dangers of crossing back and forth and feel they should be deliberately kept seperately, atleast for now keeping a hard line between riders and people on foot so then what is their place on the table?

The first revelation for this was actually another unanwered development step, for a long time Ive been wanting “traps” to be part of the game, spike strips and explosives make a lot of sense for the setting, molotov cocktails as well and in the case of the spike strip it certainly makes a lot more sense for this to be exclusive to your on foot troops.

The other issue I came across the moment I started putting actual thoguht into this was people on foot should never be able to keep up with the bikes, therefore whats the point of them right? I mean sure they could have guns and they can be easier to use but is that it? Well no I more see them as advance troops setting things up. So the current deployment rule shoves them closer towards the board so long as their touching a piece of terrain, this solves the problem and can be argued in world pretty easilly, certain missions may have to change this slightly.

However theres a larger mechanical problem Ive been struggling with, which is simply how they work, a large part of the games mechanics so far have been centered around the bikes feeling like bikes right? So then someone on foot should be able to react to things easier, theyre not in the middle of riding their motorbike at the same time. My plan for this is two fold, firstly they can use their actions at any point, they dont HAVE to use all at once. I have CONSIDERED going the activation token route specifically for the people on foot however my concern is whether that adds too much complication.

So thats a lot of answers, all of which still need to be tested however I think it works but the proof will be in the pudding. I also struggled for a long time with the busting mechanic, because by rights, them busting makes no sense someone on foot cannot crash, however I think the simple solution to this is just “something has gone wrong” I think this ‘problem’ was me over thinking it but again proof is in the pudding during testing.

So I mentioned the traps? What are the traps like you can’t test them without something to represent them Jason.. Okay okay well maybe I did create some stand ins using images Ive found and edited for my use. These images are just for playtesting, when the game becomes a thing I will obviously need to get real art done at some point

Below you will find both a 50mm & 70mm flame token used for the molotovs, rule is they spread a little before they disperse, pretty much like they’re designed to in real life. And finally the token for the spike strip.

Final update in today’s post is regarding status’s, theres been an addition to the existing states a rider could be effected by. So far we have had the following.

• Bleeding
• Burning (Untested)
• Max Stress
• Stunned

However in an attempt to add more depth to the game and help weapons feel different I am adding “distracted” which basically is a condition that can stack that forces your TN to become harder and harder to meet. So in theory if you were trying to roll a TN14 but you had Distracted+2 then you need to get to TN16 (remembering that if you go over 21 you crash because its blackjack but with dice).

So I guess this is where my rant comes to an end however I have a question for you, do you like the idea of my solution for the on-foot activations being able to be split up? Do you feel Im missing something? Do you have other questions? Please ask and comment away would love your feedback.

After the stress that was Pax Australia I actually found myself in a desperate need of a break, realistically I hadnt really taken one since I restarted this project 18 months or so ago and I finally reached the point where I knew I needed a break. So what has happened since then?

Lots of small tweaks and trying to plan ahead ojn how to be a smarter developer (this is me calling myself out on my own faults not having a go at developers). While hyper focusing I was doing Entropy Cityand nothing else bar the occasional game of Bushido or an rpg etc etc. But Ive actually started putting together warbands and grabbing things for mini projects inm between grinding but thats enough of my excuses.

About 3-4 months into my project I took some feedback from people that suggested they had wanted to have some characters on foot as wel as on bike, I immediately nodded and put it in the back of my mind until I felt I was ready to start pushing  new things in again, I’ve always wanted the focus of Entropy City to be the bikers but from the very very start of this feedback Ive always had a question that plagued me.. Yeah but where do they fit into the game? Why would you ever use them

People on foot would have to be slow, so theyre never going to reach the battle so how does this work. Well Ive finally started to find the answer to these questions and the first “duh” moment actually answers one of the questions I had in a previous update. The place of the on-foot miniatures is to set the traps, they start further up the board setting up the traps for when the enemy arrives, this fixes both of the major issues, then they’re there to support your bikers and help them get up in the case of a crash.

So last week we got a piece of news claiming that pirates had stolen the Kelp design and had it selling on Amazon before the Kickstarter was completed, an absolute terrifying thought, granted I’ve already been pretty careful with how much I share and Im far from finished anyway but just be careful how much you share, just to cover yourself from thieves. I’ll continue to be open about my development, I’m not a big name sure I know some people but unless people have the chance to find out about me and the game it will never be a success.

I’ll be back soon with some more chat on the traps, specifically Molotov cocktails

– Jason “The Bruce”

With PAX Australia now behind me and having taken a couple of days to recover from that last minute rush I felt it was time to take a look at how things went. I’ve certainly had a lot of feedback on the direction of the game that’s been constant and there’s been a few things that continue to come up that I know I need to look at but before I get to those I wanted to talk a little about how I actually got into PAX. Truth be told I didn’t initially, when I submitted my application it turned out that I (and a number of others) had been sent the wrong link and told to apply through 2022’s application.

So I paid for my own passes to pax, as I hadn’t gotten in and I was happy with that and looking forward to seeing more this year as the year before Id had an injury and struggling to get around and therefore missed most of it, less than a week before I had a message from one of the TGDA admins asking if I was interested in filling in for one of the drop outs on either Friday evening or Saturday morning, I agreed without question at the time, only realising afterwards that this means I was giving away the time I had paid to see things but I felt it was worth it.

A lot of my prep had already begun because DevCon was on Thursday which is a local game developers conference always run the day before PAX (as far as I know) so my weekend started with me leaving my tape measure behind meaning plenty of people has comments and asked but no game demos happened on Thursday night though ironically if anything I’m shocked at how much I still got from this. Most members of the TGDA are developing board games and card games at different levels of complexity, the highlight for my playtesting being “Nightshift” which was a game set in a strip club that was insanely fun.

Friday was the beginning of PAX and only one I could enjoy until 4pm because of a double booking I had made that evening and it was this day I noticed the first hiccup, long story short I spent most of Friday running around trying to organise the last few hiccups to try and ensure things went smoothly the following day, so occupied doing this that I didn’t take any time for myself at all, that evening I went to a Wrestling event for a meet and greet and a great show and then it was up early to be at the event in time the following morning.

Saturday Morning started with a hiccup Id tried to solve the day earlier, as I had been asked to fill in last minute I hadn’t received what should have been a different type of pass so security wouldn’t let me in, after a few back and forth I was inside and setting up on the smaller tables, given the table only allowed for a 2×4 setup Im somewhat amazed at how good the table looked and given I was the only tabletop miniatures game on display within their set up it helped me stand out a little, there was only a period of maybe 25-30minutes where I didn’t have at least one person in front of me, the smaller table meant action was pretty much immediate, each game starting pretty much the same way as I deliberately set myself up to be attacked by the players and then responding, giving them opportunities to get a grips with the WIP mechanics.

Of the 8 people I had that morning only 2 of them had played miniature games before and even then one of them was many years earlier, in the wee hours the night before Id rushed together a little checklist for feedback and I had every player go through and fill it out, everyone was very positive in their feedback as 3pm rolled around and my rush to pack up for the next people in time had failed I somewhat literally staggered away trying to figure out how I was going to enjoy the rest of the convention with this giant bag, my first answer was food and then I figured I would try and get it checked in at the cloakroom, running into a friend who was asking where my set up reminding me how easy it was to get lost at PAX but I reassured him how busy it was and then enjoyed my meal and then 20minutes later I shocked myself by going home and literally collapsing in exhaustion at home, the week of stress and panic had broken me. But there are two main pieces of advice I wanted to cover and now here they are.

I think you need some traps.

Now this is ironically something Ive wanted to introduce since the earliest days of starting work, its just not something Ive been ready to introduce yet for a number of reasons, I wanted to get the guns implementation done first before I introduced the next big thing but I wanted to talk a little about what I saw.. The first obvious one is a Molitov Cocktail, it’s something that could be thrown at a person or the ground to create a fire trap, explosives they must make sense but how they work is the hard thing, oil slick is another obvious one and a staple of vehicular combat, and finally a spike trap like what the police use on the highway. This is something I am 100% going to be introducing just I need to work on templates for them all and how I intend for them to work.

What about some on foot mechanics, I think you need them.

Now at first I assumed me meant as just an addition to the game which you may know was already in the plans for the future but no this is actually a piece of feedback Id had before in the earliest days of the game. When someone comes off the bike, what if you could just stay on foot and the mechanics allowed for it. In the earliest days of playtesting this was mentioned before and I’m not 100% sure who it was it might have been something Michel asked when reading my rules or it might have been one of the players themselves but my argument at the time had always been that it just wasn’t how I wanted the game to work but at the same time I’ve never been comfortable with a game that would end up requiring two minis for every one character on your army list. But I might need to start considering my options if its something players feel is a hole in the games logic.

In closing I guess I’m going to reflect on PAX, without question a very exciting opportunity to have been given and whilst I can’t say I actually enjoyed PAX in the traditional sense this year I don’t want to give the impression that’s a complain, it was a very fulfilling experience, I think its safe to say though that if Im going to do that next year it wont be at the last minute like I did this year.

Development continues for Entropy City largely as it hss from the beginning, I have a small group of friends who are willing to help me playtest on the days they have nothing else lined up but recently I had an opportunity to show off my game to the actual public for the first time. Or at least for the first time outside of those who have been reading what I am sure ia dribble half the time lol

The Nunawading Wargamers Association host an annual Games Day event where volunteers host a variety of different games as an outreach to the public, obviously trying to get new members, more people into the hobby and all of the other things a community group would desire. It was suggested by a friend (whos also involved with the club that I should try and get in on the event, with a whole bunch of nerves and doubting thoughts I filled out what would become a successful application and the ball began to roll, a ball of mad terrain painting and preparation when i realised just how much I had to paint to make my work presentable to the public.

As I am sure you’ve noticed in previous posts alarge number of the terrain I had been using was either not painted at all or half painted at best that was something i felt I would need to fix if anyone was going to have a reason to take me seriously and for the club not to regret approving my application. Entropy City is based within modern-ish day but obviously an alternate timeline of sorts given the state of the world. The benefit of this is that I can draw from real world aspirations and have fun with the ruined nature of the world I have created.

Although I very much do NOT want AI art to have place within the final version of my game for place holders during development I’ve explored quite a bit, some of this i used within posters and advertisements in world after all these are just for me to have a giggle at and some are fun things to see if anyone notices.

By the time of the event I had 98%of the stuff to a level I was happy with, if I am being honest with myself until this point in my hobby Id honestly not painted much terrain in my life and I honestly can’t figure out why, lord knows I’ve purchased enough of it, I guess it was always the easiest thing to justify leaving till later so I got to practise a lot of things that I knew in theory but not in practice. However I didnt just do what I have always been told thatbI should, infact when it comes to weathering I strayed off the beaten path significantly due to time restraints when instead of doing oil wsshes etc i weathered everything with regular washes and jjst controlled the pooling as it dried using the staining to get the look I wanted. Would a real oil watch look better of course but I felt this looked far better than most would believe it should.

So how did the event itself go? To start with I was extremely nervous and had reached a point of over thinking EVERYTHING. I had been advised earlier on that i should have someone to help me if i needed a break or go to the loo etc and a friend came along for the day (i secretly sent him money to cover some terrain he purchased on the day to thank him when he wouldbt accept my offer of money)

Generally this could have gone o w of two ways either because it was my first time Id feel completely overwhelmed and brain-dead by the end of the day or alternatively it would go well and I am very happy to say it went well.

One thing I probably should mention is that the night before i found out I was going to be right next to the 40k table, this didnt do my mind any favours going into the event, the self doubt was real but the event had an influx of people pretty much constantly throughout the day and my day started arguably in the best way it could which wss with someone coming to hunt me down after having stumbled across the very little information he could find he wantdd to know more. We played the only full game of the day (because i quickly realised playing full games was a terrible idea) and i had interested partoes at my table throughout the entire event right up until maybe the last hourish when the event was pretty much done.

Id had more interest at my table than the 40k folks had (I suspect because everyone already knew what 40k was) and the feedback had been incredibly helpful, the big thing from the day came from the sword weapon being used for the first time, it scared the living daylights out of everyone and needs to be brought into line with everything else, a simple fix of allowing a way to remove the bleed condition, which didnt really exist yet. The other feedback was that weapons didnt really feel different enough but as this is a fault of everything not being implimented into the game yet I wasnt overly concerned with that at this time.

This is a talking head video but is also available as a podcast down below, given it was pretty much talking head it made sense to release it as both.
Theres 2 differences.
1.) Audio has an addition of me explaining the content.

2.) Video has a short montage of some of the behind the scenes work and inspirations (as well as the unfortunate sight of my ugly mug 😉 )

Whichever way you chose to get the update Id love to hear more about what you think or what you want to know more about (because obviously theres a tonne not here.)

– Jason “The Bruce

This is going to be a nice short one today just to show the closer to final results of my weekends work and the painting up of my billboard and highway overpast (both from Knights of Dice).

The Metalwork itself was painting with Vallejo Model Air Metal paints,. a base coat of gunmetal followed by a dry drusing of steel from the same range.

And then for the rust I tried the Dirty Down rust for the first time and near fell of my chair this stuff is amazing.

Still some weathering to do on the signs but Im vbery happy with how they turned out so far.

Moving between different aspects of the project has been how Ive keept myself focused, because although the game ruleset has come a long way its still got a long way to go as well. And by improving my terrain and my miniatures Ive converted it will add to the aesthetic for those seeing it for the first time.

Its time for my regular self defamatory remark about not being an artist and only pretending to be because today is an entry all about me spending yesterday creating some art pieces for some terrain, I have two billboards I want siugns in and I have a highway overpass I want signs on.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do long before the game development had begun though my plans for the billboard has changed since, originally I was going to create a Stan Lee memorial but I ended up doing that in a different way. So in world I came up with this idea of an old sign advertising how great the city is to live in. Trying to tempt tourists to move here with some heavy “too good to be true vibes. The following are 4 versions of the idea I had so far, the photo is a stock image I cut out in the Gimp software.

Up next is actually where my day began but the first thing I had to do was ask my friend if anyone knew what font was the right one, a friends wife came to my rescue and a day of distraction began, once again I had tonnes of idea’s here including some silly signs suggesting you can go left to travel to 2 different world locations that are not in the same direction, another one was to pick my hometown from Tasmania which isnt a place you can drive to from where I live today, just crazy idea’s but in the end I pulled myself back to something more in world with some real world hints.

And for the last billboard we have an in world business that somehow seems to have survived the ruin and disaster of the city itself. Where as the others will DEFINATELY be getting some wear and wear added to them I intend this to remain clean and new-ish. Needless to say this is a man taking advantage of the situation to make his fortune. Richard Hackman is not a nice businessman.

Next thing terrain wise will need to be some posters for walls and some graphiti, oh and actually fully painting it.