Hey everyone, this is Kayla again. It's been a few months since our last update, what have we been working on in that time?
Yanahn has finished the stretch goal sticker sets (Lunar New Year and Christmas) and also updated the base sticker sets. Here's a preview of the fully assembled Christmas mech. You'll be able to find the pieces to put this together in the City of Pound at the right time of year.
Speaking of stickers Laurie got us quotes for the sticker sheets with a material that will allow them to be peeled off and reapplied. Gustavo is working on touching up the images you would have seen in the campaign.
I've finished the starting hexes (and entries) of the high street map. Over the course of a campaign the GM will roll to see how stores fare. Closers and new openings mean the map will change throughout play. Here's a preview of the map at the start.
(If you're a Titanic backer who hasn't replied to my email mentioned in our last update you still have time to get back to me. Your suggested store will be part of the shops that can open mid-game, as is the case for some ideas I've already take that felt like they fit there better than the beginning.)
I've also been working on the book's adventure sites. I have floor plans for the majority and a first draft of a whole site for TS Browns. TS Browns is a recently rebranded stationery shop. It was formerly inhabited by the Bank of Voles but they abandoned it during the closure. An upstart gang of house mice called the Stationers are trying to claim the turf, while rumours indicate the office supplies can be converted to powerful pieces for mechs. My work was slowed by a multi-week issue with a lack of hot water and a notification of a date I'll have to move by later this year, but still I'm happy with the writing I've done.
TS Browns Adventure Site
We've been taking things at a reasonable pace since the start of the year but in all likelihood our planned summer release is still a reasonable objective. If that changes, for whatever reason, we'll update you with a clearer picture. For the record surveys won't go out until we are close to fulfilment so we can get the most accurate data.
Hi everyone! Kayla here with a brief update for Titanic Backers specifically, but as I don't believe I can update specific pledge levels you're all receiving this, sorry. While I have you thought, I just want to say, on behalf of the whole team, thanks once again for supporting our project throughout Mausritter Month.
This update is mainly to alert Titanic Backers that I have sent out emails asking for input on locations to add to the game. These emails have been sent to the address associated with your BackerKit account. If you can't see it in your inbox please check your junk/spam folder. If you still can't find it send me a message on Discord at Rat Wave Kayla and I'll see what I can do.
We'll have more detailed updates in the future, with information for the whole family. Happy holidays!
Once again, this is Kayla, but this time instead of a look at a faction I'm going to talk about how our work in progress hexmap developed. I've worked on hexcrawls before, for Transgender Deathmatch Legend and a third party supplement I did for Hieronymus, however hexes both work and look different in those two systems compared to Mausritter, so this was gonna have a bit of a learning curve.
I started out doing a rough, and very ugly, hand sketch just trying to place buildings, with the intention that this would be what I'd start to base the hexmap around. I did a couple of sketches where the spacing felt very off or unrealistic before I landed with this.
Shops aren't even named here, they're just IDed by gangs living there.
From here I started trying to build something in HexKit with some Creative Commons hex patterns. I was then placing logos in hexes for storefronts in Affinity. I found the amount of pavement looked weird to me, and made the stores look odd, and the logos fit awkwardly across shops of just two hexes.
Somehow both way too big and also small feeling.
I next tried making the stores bigger, and filling over the lines between the hexes. I didn't like this draft as I felt the finished stores looked ugly, and the size of them felt like it forced the street itself to be huger than was necessary while also not even that accurately encapsulating the size of a shop.
Side Note: You can see some names, logos and purposes of shops develop and flip around on each version of the map.
The dots were an attempt to convey bins which I don't think is communicated very well.
Having given multi-hex shops the old college try and not being satisfied with the look, I flipped to abstracting shops all with a single hex each and made this much cleaner looking version. This is the start of the map seen on the Kickstarter page, but currently the streets are very unpopulated.
Coffee shop gets added.
I'd looked around for stock hex art that'd fit our modern city setting but didn't have much luck. Given I was already representing shops with logos rather than doors it felt a sensible enough jump to try out icons. I had an initial idea of having them be Maps-esque icons, which I do think was cute but forced icons to be unpractically small. I decided to white out the backgrounds as that felt it subtly had a similar effect. This version is almost exactly what's in our mock ups.
With Pins.
Without pins.
The main change was recolouring the black to a navy to match our body font. There'll be further changes after the end of the campaign as we work with Titanic backers to add locations to the game. I also will need to add some more locations to facilitate all the sticker sets we reach, based on our final stretch goal count.
Also the MAcDougal's logo was the wrong colours until five minutes before exporting.
So, essentially what I'm saying is you can still make a lasting impact on the map itself. How the map is at the start of a game at least, things don't always stick around on a high street for long after all, but that's a story for another day.
First of all, I'm really happy with all the support for this project. To know I'll have the chance to design a bunch of mechs and draw urban scenarios from the perspective of adventuring mice still makes me grin from ear to ear. So again, we truly appreciate everybody for believing in this project!
Today I want to talk a little bit about the internal art for this game. I don't know if you noticed, but everything I'm making for this game is first drawn by pen and in. What you see in our mockups and images are the scanned versions which I later colored digitally!
This is my usual process to work with games to achieve a more vintage look, but for Mechritter it was even more special, as I was trying to incorporate a '90s cartoon aesthetic as well. When I hear about mice duking it out in mech suits, that sounds like a saturday morning show to me!
At the same time, I tried to be really careful with the mech designs. I don't know the first thing about engineering, but I wanted to look at them and have some idea of their functionality. Extending the mice limbs seemed important to give a more imposing silhouette, but I didn't want it to feel artificial.
I like to use actual brushes to ink my sketches, gives me some good weight control for the lines
Finally, after the designs are done I scan them to add colors and make small fixes on Krita. I always like to work with a limited color palette. It may be from my experience with pixelart or just because it is easier to harmonize colors when there are fewer of them, but I think the vibrant colors here really collaborates with the cartoonish look!
I usually don't work with transparency, but the shadows in Mechritter really help the shapes stand out.
I hope this helps people to understand all the work that is behind these illustrations, I'm hoping to revamp everything I've made so far for the final material, added to many other illustrations that will be on the booklet!
The final illustration in the book layout in all its glory!
Thanks for the read and for following the project! It will be super helpful if you share it around in these last few days of campaign.
Hey. Kayla here again with another faction preview. This one looks at our poll winner, and one of the games mech capable gangs, the Skeleton Keys.
Art by Gustavo Foletto, Text and Layout by Kayla Dice
I knew early on that Mechritter should have factions with their own mechs, to offer players the chance for mech vs mech combat. I decided two mech factions was better than one. One reason for this was if Mechritter is played as part of an ongoing campaign there's one gang to give you mechs and one gang left to fight.
The other reason was to model how and why gangs with mechs would be opposed. A fact of the setting is that the greatest danger to each gang comes from humans above, rather than the other gangs. Some gangs might be more privileged with resources and hostile to outsiders, but their grievances with each other are more petty in nature or born of desperation.
So to talk about the Skeleton Keys is to talk about the Blinged Mice too, at least a little. I figured the mech gangs would need to be based out of stores with small tools that could go missing. There's both a jewellery exchange and a locksmiths on my high street so they felt like good locations to steal.
Laurie's initial proof of concept doc had some bullets about how the mice's mechs differ from traditional mecha. About the size of a biscuit tube rather than titanic. Useful and functional rather than combat focused and overpowered. Fragile, made of scrap, rather than sturdy metal. The initial idea for the two mech gangs was they'd be focused on overcoming a shortcoming of the mech. The Blinged Mice would want to get more durable, the Skeleton Keys would want to get more powerful. Those exact wants faded a lot but were the beginning of the gang's current shape.
The Blinged Mice wanting to get more durable evolved into being more defensively focused. Their backstory involves having moved from multiple bases, either due to closure or discovery. Their goals focus on securing their base and slowly acquiring more assets.
In a write up for the pre-launch page I had a line about the Blinged Mice seeing the Skeleton Keys as hyperactive daredevils, which ended up influencing their characterisation more than the original seed. They've lived a more secure life than the Blinged Mice, and don't really understand their contemporaries' caution for that reason. Their goals increase in their daringness, and increasingly step on the toes of other gangs.
The intention behind the Skeleton Keys is that they're an easy gang to like, but a difficult gang to deal with if you're trying to keep the high street gangs from exploding.
The D6 names for the Skeleton Keys are the most "Connections category" coded off the gang member names. Can anyone tell me what connects them?
Additionally, what else would people like to see covered in future updates? I can keep things focused on faction deep dives, or talk about shops or enemies? Let me know if you have any requests in the comments!
