The Long Last Step
7 months ago – Wed, Oct 11, 2023 at 10:16:15 AM

Dear Backers,

I’m happy to report that the submission process is going well! Following up on our estimates from the last update, most assets have been submitted on time or with minor delays. I would guess that we’ll have everything at the factory by the end of this month. That’s about one week later than we had planned, but it shouldn’t affect the larger timeline at all.

Today, we wanted to share just a few highlights from this near final step. Originally, we had wanted to spend this update talking mostly about the process of developing the campaign expansion, but quickly realized that it was simply too large of a subject for one update and that, frankly, our time would be better spent helping finish the final files for the game! So, once we get this thing off to the factory, we’ll make sure to spend some time bringing you up to speed about the development of the game and spotlighting some of our favorite parts of this big weird game.

Laying out the Punch Board

One of my favorite parts of working on any game project is laying out the punch board sheets. Unlike other game assets, a punch board sheet can’t even be started until you know for sure exactly what will be included in the game. This gives them a lovely valedictory quality. All of the little assets that have been tested and designed get to be lined up and neat rows before they are sent off to the factory. They grow up so quickly!

Designing punch board sheets also requires solving a fun spatial puzzle. Generally, you want to minimize the number of custom dies (the tool used to cut the custom pattern) that a project will demand. Added to this, you have to consider how large your sheets will be, which means taking into consideration both the box size and any plastic inserts.

For instance, with the base game, we are working with a box that is the same size as a Root box. Our player boards are basically half sheets, cut longwise. Because these player boards get close to the full size of the box, it’s not possible to include them in the punch board (they will need to be pre cut at the factory). This creates a natural shape for the punch board which can be stacked next to the player boards.

For the base game of Arcs, the punch board dielines look like this (just two dies!).

From there, I move over to InDesign and build frames which I can drop all of the files for the individual components into. This is very precise work, but it’s the kind of work that you do while listening to music (today, Big Thief to match the fall weather). Then, when everything is set, it only takes a few minutes to fill up the sheet and prepare it for test printing.

Color Checks

Every year we usually try to get one big upgrade for our office. This started initially as a bit of a joke when, I think, we bought a toaster after either the first Root campaign or Vast: TMM. But, in the years since we’ve gotten more appropriate improvements. After Root: Marauder, we purchased a 3d printer, which has been so invaluable both for Arcs and for our other upcoming projects.

After the Arcs campaign, we purchased a wide format printer, a beautiful Cannon GP-4000. This had been on our list for a long time, but we never really had space until we moved into our current building last year.

We use this little corridor of our office as a workshop. You can see the 3d printer in the foreground and the Canon near the window.

While no printer we could buy is going to provide us with precise color matching, this could get us a lot closer to what our manufacturing partners could do and will let us produce much nicer prototypes for conventions. It will also let us do better proofing in-house and not have to wait for pre-production copies and printed proofs from the factory.

So, with the Arcs files now approaching completion, Pati fired up the printer and started running nearly daily galleys.

We painstakingly check these proofs for any issues with textures and to get proper color matching with wooden samples and any other physical elements of the game. These proofs also help us see how all of the colors of the game work together and guide any last minute revisions. For instance, we noticed that the illustration style/coloring strategy had shifted subtly over the project, so Kyle spent a few days revising the cover of the base game to match this shift.

Rules

And, with all of the other assets taken care of, Pati was able to finish the final layout pass of the rules. These rules have been submitted for pre-production, which means the factory will be printing them and sending them to us for our final approval. While that is going on, we have sent them off for one last proofread from our external copy editor, but they are pretty much 99% there. If you’d like to give them a read, you can find them by clicking on the image below.

Looking Forward

Next month we’ll give you all an update about how the final submission went and hopefully have a lot of pictures to share from our first batch of pre-production copies. We’ll also talk about some details of our busy travel season (catch me at BGG Con or nearly the whole team PAX Unplugged!). Then, starting with the December Update, we’ll write at length about the final stages of development and take a look at how far the game has come over its year and a half of post-campaign development. See you all then!

Support Questions

Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].

Schedule Update and Notes on Tray Designs
8 months ago – Tue, Sep 05, 2023 at 12:32:25 PM

Dear Backers,

I hope this update finds you all well! In our last update, we talked a bit about the miniatures and shared some of the factory samples. Since then, the game has been progressing at a good speed. In today’s update, we want to take you through a tour of the project and offer a pretty comprehensive status update on the game and our schedule. I also want to spotlight the design of the game's storage system, so you can see our progress through one of the trickiest elements of Arcs’s production.

Status Update

Like many Kickstarters, Arcs is actually several projects which happen to be completed and produced in the same timeframe. Those projects are: the base game, the small expansion, the miniatures expansion, and the campaign expansion. Taken together, these projects represent the largest creative effort the studio has ever undertaken. Just in terms of the complexity of the graphics, development, and production, the project is perhaps twice as large as something like Oath.

That said, the team here met the challenge with aplomb. In particular, I want to single out our editor and developer Josh Yearsley and graphic designer Pati Hyun for rising to the occasion and doing some of the best work they’ve ever done on this project. It is difficult to imagine how we would have ever finished this game without them.

When it comes to submitting things to a factory, files are generally sent in over a period of months, starting with the “hard” components. Hard components include wood, dice, trays, and any plastic miniatures. They generally require custom molds and a lot of specialized tooling, and so it’s important that we give the factory a lot of extra time to get ready for them.

The first (and most complex) of these are miniatures which we were able to submit at the end of July. We followed this with the game’s custom dice a few weeks later. After that, the factory sent us some samples so that we could correct any color and shape errors—happily the errors were all very manageable. For instance, in the picture below we corrected the blue and orange dice to be the proper color. After that we moved on to the tray which took up a lot of our time in July and early August. I’ll have more to say about the tray design later on.

From there, we locked in all of the wood piece designs both in terms of shape and color. We got this to the factory last Friday. We had completed the designs for the wood around the same time we ran the Kickstarter, but there were numerous small adjustments to the design to minimize piece breakage and we wanted to wait until we had finalized quantities before the factory got specifications.  In another time honored tradition, we ended up just giving folks more—the count of ships increased throughout development from 12 to 14 to 15.

Here’s an overview of where all of the projects are at:

•  Miniatures Pack. Just needs a box design. We hope to have this submitted within a week or so.
•  Base Game.  Waiting on a few pieces of art (mostly lore cards) and some minor layout adjustments. All of the text and development is fully done. I suspect this will be ready for production by the end of September.
•  Small Expansion. Waiting on a few pieces of art and one or two minor development tweaks. This should be done around the same time as the Base Game.
•  Campaign Game. This is by far the most complex project in the  schedule. Currently we need art and a few weeks of graphic design work to finish everything up. It’s getting close, but there are just so many assets! We should be submitting these files starting the last week of September and should have this fully submitted to the factory by the middle of October. Thankfully, the biggest outstanding element are the campaign cards (of which there are nearly 400!) From a factory’s perspective, this is the best-case scenario as cards are fairly easy to produce and can happen last.

This timeline has us finishing up production for all games by sometime early next year and then hopefully on a boat before Lunar New Year. 

Fulfillment Update

In terms of our overall schedule, this means that we certainly won’t be meeting our original December fulfillment date. Our current estimate is that the game will be fulfilling to backers by April 2024.

To reflect this:

• We will lock pledges and charge cards on January 31, 2024
• Addresses will be locked on March 4, 2024

Locked pledges will be unable to add or remove items in their pledge but can still contact [email protected] to manually edit their pledge for them.

Similarly, when addresses lock, you can also reach out to our support email for any address updates. The address and pledge lock down in the pledge manager simply removes these abilities from the backer’s end.

As we get closer to fulfillment, we’ll provide a dedicated full and detailed Kickstarter update on fulfillment timelines, as well as reminders about the above dates.

Tray Design

I wanted to spend a little bit of time in today’s update talking about the game’s tray design. When we launch a project, we generally don’t have a firm idea of what a game’s storage solution should look like. Instead, we try to think in broad goals. As a player, I want a game that is easy to set up and to pack up. It should also keep the components safe from too much jostling and shouldn’t get all mixed around if the game is stored on its side. I also know that it should provide room for sleeved cards for folks who like to do that to their games, and it’s a nice bonus if the storage system is flexible enough that players can reorganize it to suit their tastes.

In the project's budget, we set aside a fair bit of the game’s cost towards this end, without really knowing what it was going to look like. Then, as we got closer to the final stages of development, I sat down with the team and started working on turning some of those storage goals into a plan.

Our first plan was some kind of sandwich box. The idea was that the campaign game would essentially come in a very tall “box bottom” and that you could just put your core box right on top. We had seen folks do this with Root boxes, and it seemed like a good approach. But, as the campaign game grew, we soon found ourselves with a box that was simply too tall. At one point it was about 80% taller than the Vast TMM Box!

The height of the box was partly owed to how we were sorting the content inside the game. We had thought about giving each of the 24 plotlines a little box which could hold their cards and tokens. Aesthetically we loved what this did in the abstract but it presented some challenges. First, it was so expensive. Boxes are one of the most expensive components in a game and filling a big box with 24 small boxes is about as silly from a cost perspective as it gets. They also take up a lot of space. In order to quickly prototype different box solutions, Pati and Andrea built “box blocks” that we could use to estimate how much space they took up in different strategies. All 24 boxes would fill half of an Oath box without too much trouble.

To test this strategy we bought a bunch of plastic deck boxes of roughly the same size and played a few campaign games using them. We found, to our surprise, that they were horrible! They didn’t have any game-play function and ended up just cluttering the game space with pieces that didn’t do anything. We ended up deciding that a card bank like Oath with dividers was far and away the more effective storage solution for the game.

But the experiment had been a good one. All of our prototyping caused us to play around with boxes the size and shape of Oath and we realized that it was a really nice size for housing a lot of cards.  So, we decided to try to build something with the same footprint. We figured with this size, we could fit the full components of the game: base game, small expansion, and miniatures (for those who wanted to swap their wood pieces for minis), and campaign game within one box. It also wouldn’t be hard for folks to keep the regular Arcs box around and move the core arcs content into that box for a casual Friday game night so they didn’t have to haul around the full Arcs experience.

At this point, we decided to start thinking about pack-up. As a goal, I wanted the intermission of Arcs to resolve itself about three times as quickly as Oath, and the game cleanup should be as fast or faster. This was going to be difficult because Arcs carries over a lot more information from game to game.

During the Kickstarter we had used a record sheet and asked players to just take notes. This was by far the most space-efficient way of doing things, but it was very time intensive. Even at the time, we knew we wanted something better, but we wouldn't be able to test anything until the game was nearly done. 

Now it was time. We started by looking at player areas. Thankfully here the storage demands were fairly simple. In each player’s area, they had a stack of cards which would guide them through the resolution of their current plotline. Then, they had a bunch of other cards which were in play. All that the game needs to remember about these cards is that they belong to a specific player. So, we designed a very simple tray with two chambers. One chamber could hold their stack of cards (yes, sleeved too!) and the other tray could hold all of their pieces. Each tray would come with a lid so that pieces would stay put. Easy.

The game also has a number of decks and things which need to be stored from game to game. We decided to just add some card dividers and lean on the game’s existing card storage to hold them as well.

This left just two things. First, how on earth can we store the board? I wasn’t about to tell folks to “just take a picture and figure it out.” I wanted something that was fast and simple, and it turns out the most obvious solution ended up being the best one.

The map in Arcs has 24 spaces. So, if players had two shallow trays with 12 spaces each, they could store each system in one space on the tray. Embossing on trays is generally really cheap too so we didn’t have to worry about any extra cost for labeling them.  It only took a few minutes to rough out a test tray and we found pretty quickly that it cut the game’s tear-down time to under 10 minutes.

Like the player trays, these also have lids so things should stay put. We did a lot of testing to make sure each chamber could hold a number of pieces well over the average that were commonly in the different spaces on the map. In the rare instances where you have too many pieces to put in one zone, we are going to include a couple overflow bags and markers which players can use.

The final element that remained are the few little adjustments to the game that are so specific it would be hard to come up with a physical storage solution that was more elegant than a piece of paper to take notes on. We are hammering out the final layout for that now, but it’s basically a small sheet of paper that folks can use to record their scores and the odd-and-ends of the match.

With the game’s saving system in hand, we were then able to move back to the tray design itself. One thing that had bothered me in some of our recent tests was just how messy the table got over the course of play. I learned during John Company that a few storage trays could go a long way in helping keep the table area tidy. So, we created a system using two trays which acted as “caddies” that would carry and organize the pieces you would need during the game.

With all of the removable trays squared away, we now knew everything we needed to know to finalize the box size and the game’s internal tray. This was a tray that would never be removed and would be used to hold all of the game's various components (including the smaller removable trays).

The result is a box that is the same basic size as the Oath box but is about twice as thick! In the end, the storage solution and the size of the game grew far beyond our expectations. But the success of this campaign and the studio’s general financial health have allowed the team to build the best solution we could without compromise. 

Looking Forward

Next month we’ll share some details about some of the final development changes to the campaign game and give you a sneak peak into some of the work that goes into preparing files for factory submission. See you all then!

Support Questions

Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].

Miniatures Update
10 months ago – Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 01:56:39 PM

Dear Backers,

The whole team here at Leder Games has been very busy over the past month. We’ve been doing a lot of work vetting the core systems and have moved most of the campaign content into final balancing. There’s still quite a bit of work to do, but the finish line is in sight. In terms of development, the next couple of months will see continual balance adjustments, usability testing, and just a bit more design work on a couple outstanding systems and features. While that’s ongoing, we’ll be tying up some loose threads around the game’s box design and campaign pack-up.

We’ll be writing a lot more about this process in our August update. In the meantime, if you’d like to hear more about the game’s development, you can watch our most recent designer chat here.

But, enough about game development. Today, we want to tell you a little more about the game’s miniatures pack.

Miniatures!

The Arcs miniatures pack replaces all of the wooden game pieces. The designs themselves haven’t changed much since the Kickstarter campaign. We knew pretty early on that we wanted clean, unfussy miniatures that looked more like Lewis chessmen than the kinds of spindly designs that are common in miniatures games. We did this because we felt like this design principle matched the game’s hand-drawn aesthetic. We also wanted a sturdier design so the miniatures could be easily stored in a bag without being damaged and took up roughly the same amount of space as the wooden pieces they replaced.

What we didn’t know for sure was how the pieces should be scaled. As you can see from the image above, the base ship is smaller than a root meeple. This is because the map for the game has almost twice as many spaces compared to Root. And, because ships need to be tipped on their sides (to show damage), keeping the base ship on the smaller side helped stop the board from getting too cluttered. We went through a lot of different ship sizes before arriving at the final size and tried hard to get to something that felt easy to handle.

There have also been some gameplay changes over the past year that have allowed us to reimagine how the pieces get used. For instance, the “agent” miniatures were originally designed to be a flexible special unit piece which players would unlock during the campaign and then would move on the map similar to a ship. However, as we continued to develop the campaign game, we found that this piece was rarely useful and just cluttered the board both visually and mechanically in ways that could be handled better in other ways.

 At the same time, the humble influence cube became more and more important. So, we decided to collapse the agents and influence cubes. So, rather than get 3 agents for each player color, the miniatures pack now includes a set of 10 agents which will replace cubes and we promoted the influence cube to an agent meeple for those who won't be using the miniatures.

This sizing also helped us establish a scale for the other pieces. For instance, we knew that we wanted the imperial ships to be about twice as bulky as the player ships. And, the flagship/generation ship pieces needed to be twice the volume of the imperial ships. This put them roughly the same size as an Oath pawn, which felt right given how they focus a player’s position in similar ways.
 

I hope that gives you a sense of how the miniatures are turning out. We’re still waiting on a couple samples and are in the process of finalizing some of the production details such as which wash we’ll be using and what the packaging will look like, but most of the big questions have been answered. Looking back at the original Kickstarter page, I’m happy to report that we’ve stayed true to my favorite Leder Games tradition—giving more than was originally promised. The original plan was for a miniatures pack of 84 washed pieces. The current number is now 116 (15 ships, 10 agents, 1 flagship per player and then 12 imperial ships).

Alright, that’s it for now! Next month we’ll talk a little more about the game’s schedule and bring you up to speed on the amount of content in the game and both the small base game expansion and the larger campaign expansion.

Support Questions

Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].

Campaign TTS Release
11 months ago – Thu, May 25, 2023 at 02:04:32 PM

Dear Backers,

Today we are releasing Arcs’ campaign mode to you all. You can find all of the links you need to play the game on Tabletop Simulator at the bottom of this message.

If you’re the kind of backer who wants to avoid spoilers or doesn’t like to play a game before it is fully done, please disregard this update. In next month’s update, we will go into more detail about the schedule of the game and some of the logistics. We might even have some news and pictures of the miniatures.

This Massive Game

My goodness, there is a lot of content here. What began as investigation into a new way of making campaign games has grown into a sprawling space-opera generator.

One of the things I love about this game is how the asymmetry of the player positions gets fully fleshed out and explained. You’re not just different because you happened to pick a particular faction—you're different because of the consequences of your choices and the choices of the other players. It has a wonderful emergent quality that feels like the logical extension of Oath and Root.

Here’s what I mean. Players might start the game as the Magnate and try to leverage their commercial acumen to close critical deals. In the second game, perhaps disillusioned (or just unsuccessful!), you’ll consider going into piracy. Maybe all of those relics you stole as a Pirate might move you to become the Preservationist and see that they are kept safe from the other players. Even as you attempt to hide away those objects in the final game, you’ll still benefit from all of the powers you’ve picked up across the first two acts. You’ll still have your pirate fleets on hand to help secure relics and, of course, could always fall back on a slick negotiation to get that last critical object. If you like our other games, I think you are going to find so much to like here.

A Few Notes about the Campaign

First, if you haven’t played the base game or haven’t played the base game since launch, please play it again first! We’ve made tons of improvements since the Kickstarter launch, and playing a match of the base game is by far the best introduction to Arcs.

The campaign adds a few new systems to the game. While the systems are not, individually, that complex, we’ve found that it’s very difficult to teach players the campaign mode unless the teacher (and ideally the rest of the table) has played the single session before. This will be easier when the game has completed its usability review and we’ve put in better player aids and maybe commissioned some video tutorials, but, for the time being, the best thing you can do to prepare for a campaign is to play a game of base Arcs before jumping in the deep end of the pool.

Second, this game isn’t done yet! We’ve entered the final stretch, but there is still quite a bit of work to do before the game is really and truly done. While the core design is complete and the vast majority of the content has been fleshed out, there are still several areas that are going to be receiving a lot of work in the coming months.

In particular, I want to highlight a few key areas:

Terminology. Right now the game uses an odd mix of developer-shorthand and in-world naming conventions. We will be smoothing this out over the coming months and it shouldn’t cause any gameplay issues. So, for instance, “influence cubes” will likely become “agents” or “envoys” (and likewise be replaced by those lovely meeples you’ll find on the bottom left of the TTS module).

Balance. We’re only in the opening stages of the game’s balancing. This seems like a wild thing to say after nearly 3 years of work, but it was important that we have the design fully mapped out before we started seriously tinkering with the numbers. There is a lot of work ahead of us, both in terms of adjustments to specific numbers and abilities. Likewise, we’re doing a lot of meta-game balancing right now as well to make sure that the games are narratively coherent and we aren’t over or under emphasizing any particular act. We’re getting close, but there’s a lot of fine-tuning that remains to be done.

Playing the Campaign with Two Players. Our testing so far has been focused on the three and four player game. As the bulk of the game’s content goes into final development and balancing, we’ll be turning our attention to the campaign’s two player experience. Currently, all of the campaign content will work with two players, but there’s a lot of balance work and potentially some special rules that may need to be introduced to make the two player experience run smoothly.

Final Board Geometry and Layout. We continue to work on the game’s map. The new layout has been working very well for the campaign assets, but we’re still fiddling with colors, connections, and a host of small ergonomic matters to get it to really sing. You can see our working draft of it below. I'm sure folks here will be glad that the "dark side" won out in our internal discussions of the map's overall look.

Usability. We have just started preparing player aids and building out the campaign aids that will go a long way in making the longer game digestible. For instance, right now when you unlock a new power, the rules will instruct you to swap out a few cards or maybe add a card to the galactic rules aid. In the final version, we’ll likely have an additional card which will more fully explain your new powers and may instruct you how to explain those powers to the other players. We’re also taking all of the critical colors through a careful analysis and making lots of little adjustments to card layout to help things be as clear as possible. We are also thinking about making some kind of strategy guide (printed or as a website) which will help players navigate through the game's many possibilities. Unlike a lot of campaign games, Arcs works both as a fully sealed or as a transparent system. The first time you play a plotline, you can enjoy the story beats as they reveal themselves over the course of the campaign. However, the plotlines are designed to be played many times and so new and experienced players are welcome to study up on their plotlines before they play as well.

The Road Ahead

Arcs is by far the most ambitious project our little studio has yet attempted. This is not something I say lightly (or too loudly—Oath might hear). We have generally done a good job keeping to our schedule. The game is feature and content complete and much of the work that remains is just a matter of working our way through some very long to-do lists.

Over the next few months, we’ll be continuing our intensive testing and editorial overview while Kyle finishes the game’s art. We'll also start finalizing our box sizes, insert design, and general pack-up strategy. While these things wrap up, we will start finalizing our production schedule. As soon as we know our fulfillment schedule, we’ll be sure to update you all.

Playing the Game

For those of you who want to explore the campaign, you can find the TTS module here.

Note: the TTS for the campaign game features a lot of white cards. This makes it a lot easier for us to update cards over the course of development--you can safely disregard them!

Both the base game and campaign rules can be found here.

As in Oath’s final development, we’ll be continuing to update this release of the game throughout the summer with new art and content improvements. We’ll probably update it once every month or so until the game is complete. Because of these updates, if you have a campaign ongoing, I recommend players keep your caching setting within TTS on so the game doesn’t change mid-campaign, and then turn it off when players want to update their mods to the latest version. To change your caching setting, click on the gear in the main menu to get to the Configuration screen.

Support Questions

Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].

Design Update and Map Reveal!
12 months ago – Thu, May 04, 2023 at 12:20:20 PM

Dear Backers,

I hope this finds you all well. Today, I want share you a little update about the progress of the game's development and show off our new map! 

Design Update

Development is moving at a fast clip. As I mentioned in the last update, basically all of the game content is designed, and we’re spending most of our time attending to two things:

First, we’re improving and expanding tons of the game's content. As is the case with any creative project, it’s never enough to just make something. The real work comes in the process of editing and rewriting. Many of the plotlines in Arcs have gone through half a dozen iterations or more. There's still a lot of work ahead of us, but we're making very good progress. Every week our content changelog is getting a little shorter than the previous week.  In addition, most of the odds-and-ends of the design are clicking into place. Recently we've reworked the event phase to its lightest form yet, balanced the imperial taxation dynamics, and greatly simplified the intermission and final scoring systems.

Second, we’re doing a ton of cleanup on the game. Over the course of the development of the campaign, we’ve freely introduced new systems when they were necessary to the development of a particular plotline. Now that we have the game’s 24 plotlines fully fleshed out, the core development team has been going through the design and cleaning up any extraneous systems. This cleanup is one of my favorite parts of the process because it allows us to step back and understand where the design is spending its energy in aggregate. Most of our time is spent focusing on details, so it's nice to be able to take a wide view and thing about the overall composition of what we're building. 

This part of the process also allows us to look closely at the game’s components and physical design. We’re playing a lot more Arcs in the office these days and we’re getting ready to build a second campaign kit so we can run twice as many in person games. In the past month we’ve started settling on the sizes for dozens of components and have started working out templates for some of the custom pieces that the campaign requires. 

Part of this includes introducing little aids to help new players. For instance, we've gradually introduced more text to the game's plotline cards so that players can better get a sense of what it means to select a particular plotline. 

I’m happy to say that we’ll be sharing all of this work with you very soon. Our plan is to have a full campaign TTS kit available for all backers by the 25th of May. So, keep an eye on your inboxes for our next update where we'll share all of the details. I can’t wait to show you how far the game has come!

The Map

Arcs' map has gone through huge changes over the course of its development. The original map was a node-and-link style map, similar to Root. Other variants have been fully modular. When we presented this game last year, we used an area map similar to a Risk map. In the months since we've experimented with a few different approaches but kept coming back to that area map. 

Normally, in a project like this, we settle on the general map design very early in a project. With Arcs, we really had to know the full size of the campaign before we finalized anything. To be honest, this has been a little nerve wracking, but it was clearly what the project demanded.

Well, we’ve got a map! Kyle has put together a new design that we’ve started playing on internally this week. There are many elements of this map that are still provisional. The background gradient is just something I whipped together quickly and the UI is just a placeholder for now. We’ll also be taking it through color usability and be making some adjustments to make sure the connections between the systems are crystal clear, but hopefully it will give you a better sense of what the final thing will look like!

I love how this map leans into Kyle’s analogue aesthetic. A lot of science fiction strategy games tend to model their boards on how their computer-game counterparts look. That’s fine for games that are consciously modeled on Stellaris or Masters of Orion or whatever, but it’s never felt right for Arcs. Arcs is a big, weird game, and I’m glad it’s got a big weird map to go with it!

Alright, that's it for now. In just a few weeks, we'll have another update with you with details on how to play the campaign. I'm hoping to also start doing little plotline spotlights around then to take you through some of the game's content as we enter the final stage of development. Have a wonderful day!

Support Questions

Finally, as always, if you have any questions, feel free to write to us at [email protected].