Image taken from Fallout Warfare
This morning I learned that as a preorder bonus for Fallout Tactics, players were given a copy of Fallout Warfare, a pen and paper war game based on the fallout content. This in itself is interesting, but when I saw the printable tokens, I got excited. Creating tokens for NPCs in Project Burner has been an issue on my mind for a while, with early solutions using improvised tokens like bottlecaps, funnily enough. The problem with generic tokens is that they are hard to read at a glance. I also thought about printing out flat square tokens which used the card's artwork, but that also led to problems with readability. The images above are striking and immediately recognizable, with a relatively small base which would fit well on a one inch grid, which is the intended scale for Project Burner at the moment. The artwork is lovely, but this solution doubles the amount of monster art which needs to be produced, since there must be a front and back sprite. In Fallout these sprites were already present in the main game, but in Project Burner it would add a tremendous load onto the illustrator(s). I think the compromise is to just render the front view on both the front and the back of the token. I assume that orientation is very important in Fallout Warfare, which necessitates the need for a front and back image to be clearly defined, but in Project Burner characters can freely turn around on their tile without issue. In other games character orientation is important for setting up backstab moves, stealth kills, or as flanking maneuvers, but the current design goals for Project Burner do not include those edge cases. If I do implement a flanking like mechanic, it would be based on having two friendly characters adjacent to the same enemy character, which eliminates the need for monsters to have a well defined direction which they are facing. To get back on topic, I think this will serve as a nice template for making the print and play monster tokens, as I get further in developing art assets.