Entropy City: Making a Wargame

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.