MECHA CROSSFIRE | Kaleb Brooks

MECHA CROSSFIRE:
NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE

Four warring corporations fight for control of a distant planet's resources and oil using massive battle mechs. Equip a variety of weapons and tactically build bridges to blow each-other to bits.

Mecha Crossfire: Nuclear Apocalypse is a virtual board game that can be played in Tabletop Simulator. It combines the strategic gameplay of games like Settlers of Catan with the Explosive Combat of Mecha Games.

Play Game

Team: 5 | Role: Gameplay / Rules Designer, Artist | Timeline: 14 Weeks |
Tools: Adobe CC, Miro, Excel, Blender, Tabletop Simulator

Strategic

The game needed to appeal to tactical players. I handled this by creating deep and complex systems for the players to learn and utilize.

Convey Complex Ideas Simply

It was very important that we be able to convey the rules of the game in a simple and easy to understand way, so I made sure to keep that in mind in every revision of our rule book.

Destruction and Mayhem

I knew it would be hard to make a deeply strategic game like this feel exciting, like robots are really battling it out. To make this work I focused on highly kinetic gameplay. Allowing players to knock each other around.

Resource to Move

It was an essential design challenge for us to utilize a resource to move core mechanic in our game. In order to support this, we created a deep resource management system.

DESIGN PILLARS

GAMEPLAY AND RULES DESIGN

Originally, the game was going to focus on base destruction. A lot of our early concepting was inspired by the Minecraft Gamemode: Skywars. (Credit to Joshua Shoemberger for this original iteration of the rules).

After some iterations and playtests, we settled on this next prototype which became very similar to how the game looks and operates today. Focused on killing the other players instead of destroying bases helped encourage a more aggressive playstyle.

As you can see here, I really start to flesh out the rules here. I wanted to make it a point that our rules would have lots of visuals. So we began making our drafts in Miro, since it let me quickly add remove and scale images in a very simple way.

The rules really start to take form here. I begin using outlines and stroke weight, as well as images, arrows and bold/italics and other infographics to help convey this complex information as best as I can to players.