THE PROCESS · NEWEST FIRST
Ten years from
a kitchen table
to burning tokens.
a kitchen table
to burning tokens.
I love tables with cards on them. I love deckbuilders. And, I love mechs. And a confession: I have a weakness for the grotesque: large worlds and large intricate gameplay with much art and big stories. This is my story of how a wonky paper prototype became the game behind the PLAY button.
NOW
04 · A NOTE ON GENERATIVE AI
Much of what you see was made with it. I regard the result as a game made by the community.
On top of ten years of my own drawings, rules and stubbornness sit tools trained on the work of millions of makers. I will not pretend otherwise, and I will not pretend that is nothing. It is why half of the profit of the finished game goes back out, to causes you pick. How that works.
05 · STILL HAND-MADE
The whole world-building idea.
The sketches the generative art was made from.
The rules, and every number on every one of the 266 cards.
Twenty drivers, their names, their factions and their great works.
The boards: forty-nine arenas laid out tile by tile, and the bottle's court.
Jane, Sue, Toni and V, and every line they say.
The paper prototype, still in its box, still the specification.
The testing. Which, from here, is you.
2026
03 · THE TOOLS
Then I could describe a mech and see it standing on the board by the evening.
The tools changed faster than my excuses. A sketch became a rigged, textured driver. A rule I changed at breakfast was in the game by lunch, with the AI already playing it against me by dinner. The physical prototype became the specification; the drawer became a backlog. Below: one driver, Yol, from the page to the board.
SKETCH · 2017
GEN-AI, FROM THE SKETCH · 2026
ON THE BOARD · 2026
THE CARD · PROTOTYPE 2018
THE SAME CARD · 2026
THEN
02 · THE DRAWER
It worked. It also needed a hundred illustrations, a coder and a decade.
A card game is cheap to invent and expensive to finish. Every card wants art, every rule I changed wanted a rewrite, and a board with twenty mechs on it wanted a studio I did not have. Gwendolyn and I tried to prototype it, but ended up mostly working and teaching. I also focussed on running a company that makes HackShield and CyberHeroes, two other amazing games. The box went in a drawer. Drawers are where most games live.
2018
01 · THE TABLE
The first prototype was paper, a marker and people who owed me a favour.
Printed cards, a grid drawn on a playmat, tokens borrowed from Warhammer 40K. My wife and my colleagues played it first, at the lunch table. Two ranges, two energy pools and drawing from a Source you had to stand next to were already there. So was the rule that the floor eventually burns, because nobody would stop turtling.
PLAYTEST · 2018
2017
00 · THE FIRST DRAWINGS
Before there were rules, there were drivers.
I started drawing them in 2017: the robes, the helmets, the shoulders too big for the room. Yol's sketch, further up this page, is from that year.