Making a mech game

I am a stranger here. I do not belong, and yet I am making my home here. Cuckoo birds are famous for laying their eggs in other bird’s nests, and tricking those birds into raising their young¹. Fey too have a history of swapping children who wander into the woods.

Let me back up. I am making a mech game, and I know nothing about mechs.

I mean, I know as much as anyone. I know a mech is a big ol’ robot. I know people go inside the robot. I recently learned that Iron Man is not a mech. Apparently, there’s a size requirement he doesn’t meet. You must be thiiiis tall to be a mech.

I am the hobbit (coo coo ca-shooes)

I am a stranger here. I can count on one hands the number of episodes of Power Rangers episodes I have watched. I did read one of their comics, but it smoothed over the parts that it assumed I knew, left me hungry for answers to questions it thought I didn’t need to ask. It’s like teaching a hobbit to tie their shoes: you’re focusing on the knots and the loops, while they’re still trying to come to grasp with what a shoe is and why one would wear such a thing. I am the hobbit here!

Anyone can get a license, they don’t check!

I have some mech knowledge. I’ve played Scythe, a board game that technically features mechs. Not in any meaningful way, we don’t get into the nitty gritty of what they do. But they carry people around (many people!) and they fight. They’re big, too, the biggest things on the map.

I’ve read a single Warhammer 40k book about mechs (and some others, not about mechs). I even liked it! I’ve played 13 Sentinels, which is a mech game few have heard of, and fewer have played. It’s a visual novel about teenaged mech pilots with an RTS tacked on. I played it almost entirely in Japanese, and not for the usual reasons a 30-year old white man might do such a thing!².

I have seen about 10 minutes of Attack on Titan. If this has mechs, add it to my limited credentials. If the show doesn’t have mechs, please take into consideration that I only saw 10 minutes of it when you subtract it from my score.

(Tom Waits voice): What’s he building in here?

I’m making a mech game. Or rather, I’m making a game about mechs. Or rather rather, I’m making a game about what I think mechs are.

There’s an excellent quote that I cannot find right now. If you recognize it, leave a comment. It’s about how authors will occasionally jump into a genre without having read sufficiently enough of the genre to know what they are doing. A sci-fi author will release an “exciting new book”, and it turns out they are re-treading ground that has been better tread before. They didn’t realize it! What’s new to them is tried and tired tropes that their audience is bored with.

Readers don’t want that. They want new ideas that build on the past. A new perspective is great! But the readers know the deep magic, and if the writers aren’t aware of the well-trod road, they will walk it by mistake.

I don’t want to do that!

Taking the road less traveled (but only because I’m very, very lost)

Above, I linked to Mech Week by Skeleton Code Machine, an excellent RPG blog. That series was a splash of cold water in the face of my trespass onto these foreign lands. I don’t belong here! I answered the questions so incorrectly that I baffled the experts with my responses. Wait, he picked the ones we put in as a decoy? And he did it genuinely? What is going on!?

This must be how scientists felt when learning about color blindness.

Enough formaldehyde to choke a horse, (OR: No really, what’s he building in there)

I am making a game about mechs. I am focusing on the relationships between the pilots of the mechs. CassK has³ a two-player mech game where one mech is out of control, and the other, their partner, may have to shoot them down. Unless they can make contact in time. Throughout the game, you reminisce about your partner, you make the sacrifice (should one be required) meaningful. And then they die. And you care, because you took the time to know them.

In the same way that many murder mysteries first allow you to care for the victim before their demise, the attachment is the thing. If we just wanted a game about big robots, well, that would be a mech game⁴.

Principles? You mean we’ve got principles?!

I’ve got 3 guiding lines with my mech game:

1. It focuses on the pilots
2. Novelty (for a certain definition)
3. Genre conventions only as far as they’re engaging

Let me elaborate.

1. The pilots are important. The relationships between them is even more important. This is where the drama comes in, this is what makes it a role-playing game.

2. I want to focus on things I don’t see enough of in mech games, and that means a) linking together mechs and Voltronning around. Maybe that’s common, but I don’t see a lot of it! I want supermechs, and that’s what I’m building⁵.
   
   I also want to take people out of their mechs. Too often characters are complacent, wrapped in steel and titanium. I want to incentivize them to launch themselves out of the mech at high speeds, dealing absurd amount of damage to an enemy on the other side of the battlefield…far away from the safety of their mech.
   
   And, when the carrot won’t do, I want terrifying little robotic scavengers that reach inside the cockpit, shatter glass, and forcibly eject the pilots at their feet. Take away the suit, and what are you?⁶.

3. Heat management is passe and fiddly, and I have little to say there that has not been said. Although, I do love the idea of overclocking your mech at great detriment to yourself (and to others!), so we’ll see where the balance ultimately lands.

A box of scraps? Really?

So that’s it. I’m building a mech game. It’s coming soon, which means I expect to have it ready for playtesting in the spring (maybe sooner!), and am anticipating a 2026 release date.

Stay tuned here, or the usual places for more information.

1. This is, of course, the origin of the word cuckold. ↩

2. It was because I didn’t realize I had a choice until I found the menu some 30 hours into the game. Whoops! ↩

3. Err, had. CassK has left the design space, so I think this is lost media now. I maintain and treasure my digital copy. ↩

4. Or, well, maybe it would. We’ve already established that I shouldn’t be the one drawing these lines. ↩

5. As an aside, this has been a fun design challenge, limiting complexity while allowing for cool combos by linking up. I’m proud of what’s cooking so far! ↩

6. Still competent, but I don’t want to say too much yet. ↩