This is just a quick update on progress on Mechritter. We are currently in the editing and layout phase and hope to go to print in mid-to-late July. We will open the pledge manager for shipping once we go to print, so we have an exact understanding of weight.
Extra bits: 1) We will have character sheet demos available to try out at UK Games Expo. Come find us there! 2) We have been working on the logos for the custom box sets - rather than just taking a random bit of art we've designed a new logo which we think will look really good with foiling. We're just now deciding on a foil colour, as though we were originally going to go with gold, a holographic or chrome foiling might be closer to what the theme of the project requires. 3) Our preorder store is open now if you'd like to share with a friend who missed out on backing the project.
New Logo:
Sorry for the businesslike update but I just wanted to smash out all the requisite info before sharing some snapshops and snippets from the High Street.
Art By Gustavo
Tales From The High Street
It was dark in the funfair during the graveyard shift. The shiny metal skeletons of its rides were lit up only by dim, yellow LEDS. The kiosk fronts were covered with grey metal grates and padlocked shut. For regular amusement-seekers business hours were long over. But for the animals of the high street, it was prime time, and everyone knew it.
In the corners and gutters and vents, hundreds of little lungs collectively inhaled and waited, watching a dark-coated security guard move up and down the pathways with a flashlight, checking to ensure no unwanted visitors were present. As the human jangled his keys in his hand, Starry Biscuits and his gaggle of Junk Foodies flinched. His feet were just centimetres away from them.
“Nearly time now.”Starry whispered to the rest of the crew. “Don’t let the others intimidate you. Remember, we’re here for one thing, and one thing only. Keep. Your. Cool.”
The eyes of the small gang of mice were focussed solely on one target: Sally’s Pretzel Counter.
The kiosk had opened in the centre of the fair last week, and since then, they’d scouted it every evening. Unlike the other stands, there was no wire portcullis to bypass. Its treasures were exposed to the world.
Unfortunately, usually there were no treasures to be had. The precious doughy delights of the kiosk were sold or taken away at the end of each day. But today, one of the Sallys had left in a hurry, without completing the regular stock clearance. As soon as Starry had noticed, he’d sprinted all the way back to HQ for backup, and returned with more paws. They would need as many helpers as possible to carry their loot away.
The security guard reached the end of his path, and headed back towards the car park. As he slowly locked and bolted the front gate, Starry tensed his haunches. He was ready to spring into action.
Clang.
The gates were pulled shut with a rattle of bolts.
Starry counted under his breath. “Three, two… and… go!”
The entire fair erupted into a cacophony of action. Some mice ran for the prize bins. A group of Skeleton Keys started cutting their way through the bottom of one of the grills. But the Junk Foodies had eyes for none of that. They were sprinting, sprinting across the wide, open ground to get to the centre. This was their time. This was their moment.
Starry panted, gasping for breath. He could already taste the pretzel in his mouth. He wondered, would it be salty or sweet? Soft or crunchy? Whatever it was, he already knew, it would change his life.
He wasn’t looking ahead of him, so he didn’t realise that the Junk Foodie in front of him had stopped dead. He crashed into him and they went tumbling tail-over-whiskers.
“What are you doing, Jaffa?!” Starry snarled furiously. “Get a move on, or get the cuttysark out of my way!”
Jaffa pointed upwards, wordlessly. His snout was hanging open in shock.
“Wha’ in tha’ leicestersquare is that?”
From the arm one one of the rides far above, something was descending to the Pretzel counter. It wasn’t a mouse, though it was mouse-shaped, a hulking mass of cardboard and tin and lights attached to a long, metal wire. On its head was a helmet with a long, red search beam. Attached to one arm was a menacing, five-inch-long blade. And on its chest--
Starry gasped. “Is that…!?”
“Tha logo of tha City of Pound? I’d be’ i’ is, Biscuits.”
The thing landed on the counter with a loud thud. With ease, it vaulted into the glass display case and pulled from its back a large plastic bag, decorated with the Insignia of Pound.
“That thing… it’s not just going to take one pretzel. It’ll have them all.” Starry could only watch in horror as the hulk stuffed baked goods into the bag, one after the other. When there was nothing left, it attached the bag to its back. Starry saw it stumble slightly under the weight, but that was no satisfaction as the thing turned to survey them.
As the spotlight hit Starry’s face, bathing it in red, the thing spoke, its tinny, robotic voice echoing out from behind the helmet.
“Sorry lads. Looks like you were beaten by a whisker.”
Then it tugged twice, sharply on the wire. Somewhere far above, a winch engaged and the wire began to haul the hulk -- and its precious cargo -- up. As he watched all his hopes and dreams disappear into the sky, only one thought went through Starry’s mind.
“We have got to get ourselves one of those.”
An NPC From The Streets
Ruby Earring Personality: She's been around the block and won't take any nonsense. Abrasive yet eccentric, Ruby prefers to play her cards close to her fur but cares more about not letting anyone walk into danger. Likes:
Gold
Curved Pennies
Sensible mice
Cunning mice
Dislikes:
Nickel
Ice cream truck jingles
Showoffs
Airheads
Ruby’s been part of the Blinged Mice since the greeting card days, but she’s only been leading the gang since they set up in the Cash Swappers. She's seen more than a couple of friends leave the street, and with each time the Mice had to move hideout, Ruby wondered if it was her time too. When Rat King Cole gave her the pitch about the Mechritter project she jumped at the chance. The Blinged Mice are the most important vermin in the world to her and they're counting on her to lead them to a future full of rubbish.
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.
