Multiplayer announcement, programming team, Massif loan, & studio rename

A bunch of fantastic news for Lancer Tactics! Here are the ledes:

• Remote multiplayer is now officially on the roadmap.
• We’ve hired three new programmers to the team to implement multiplayer, help clear out the bug backlog, and shape up our tech art.
• These three roles are possible because Tom Bloom & Miguel Lopez of Massif Press, the creators of Lancer, loaned us funding for a final year of development.
• We are officially renaming our dev studio from Wickworks to Lacewing.

Let’s get into it!

Massif Press loan

We’ve had a number of conversations with publishers about Lancer Tactics, but ultimately decided that the game has enough legs on its own to allow us to launch independently. Early access sales on itch.io are able to cover our current burn rate, but without much extra room beyond that.

Localization and marketing were going would have to come from either us loaning the company money or wait after Steam release (the latter being obviously not practical if we wanted a successful release day). Large increases in scope, such as remote multiplayer, would be similarly delayed. Partnering with a publisher would have solved that through getting an advance & their provided talent, but at the cost of a forever-revenue-split after launch.

Enter Massif Press: they have given us a low-interest loan in return for recoup after launch. They’re doing this in order to support Lancer Tactics as a major Lancer community project — this is extremely generous on their part & we’re grateful for the trust!

Our revenue projections for Steam are very promising (we hit 50k wishlists from just the first trailer; for reference the hit Tactical Breach Wizards had 284k wishlists on launch after several big marketing splashes) so we’re confident we’ll be able to pay it back, but afaik it’s rare to be able to get development funding for games without some kind of profit split on release.

Everyone say thank you Tom & Miguel!!

Programming team

So: we have three new members of the dev team! Please welcome Isabel Condé as Bugfixer, Minh Tran on Multiplayer Support, and Dana Holdampf as Tech Artist.

Isabel

Hi you! I’m Isabel, and I’m joining the LT team to catch bugs under cups and put them outside. I’ve been working in the games industry for over a decade now, on projects from web and mobile to AAA FPS. I’ve also got a background in visual art and I design tabletop RPGs and supplements, including KISHU, Arkball, The Power Words Engine, and a Lancer [hack/demake] called the Open Mech Game, which you can find along with some of my other projects here.

At the moment I’m getting organized and developing processes for bug triage and tracking and the like, but in a coming update I hope to be able to share some by-the-numbers Bug Stats with y’all. Keep up the excellent work reporting issues on the Discord! You rock! Thanks!

Minh

Greetings, I’m Minh! I’m a web and game developer that’s worked with multiplayer systems and architecture on multiple shipped games for several years. I love thinking about the logic and networking that allows games to be a shared experience across the world; to invite players to be a part of the experience for others. I’m excited to join the team and help bring multiplayer into Lancer Tactics!

Dana

Hey! I’m Dana. I’ll be working on Technical Art for Lancer Tactics, which means I’ll be doing things like making visual effects, getting under the hood to tweak terrain rendering, and teaching light how to do some new tricks. I’ve worn a lot of hats over the 10-odd years I’ve been in game dev, whether it’s working on art and programming for console games, designing puzzle mechanics for browser games, or writing interactive fiction. You can find some of my personal projects over here.

I was introduced to Lancer through the Friends at the Table podcast, which rekindled my longstanding love of tabletop games. I’m really jazzed to join this project, and look forward to sharing the new visuals, environments, and tools we cook up for y’all!

Multiplayer

The second* most often asked question I’m asked about LT is “will there be multiplayer?” — but one of my hardest jobs is saying no to scope creep. I’ve never made a multiplayer game before and until now haven’t felt confident that we could pull it off without compromising the rest of the project.

*(only beaten by “why no hexes?”)

However, it’s never sat right with me. I’m haunted by a ghost of a manifesto that whispers: The only games worth making are ones that bring people together. I don’t know if I agree with it, but I’m also never able to fully banish it from my thoughts.

Lancer as a TTRPG directly requires that people gather, either in person or digitally, and have conversations as they shuffle their little robot tokens around. Lancer Tactics as a video game removes the requirement of human fellowship and becomes a conversation between you and a machine.

The latter is not completely without merit on this front. It can generate proximate communities that gather to talk about their experiences playing the game, helping each other with it, and how to modify it — but the direct experience becomes one of solitude.

So I’m so, so pleased to be able to bite the bullet and mark multiplayer as a target for launch. Our objectives for enabling multiplayer, in priority, are:

1. Instant action combats, where players control PC mechs.
2. Modules, where players go through multiple downtime and combats and cutscenes together.
3. GM mode, where one (or more?) players control the NPC decisions and have direct control over the timing of rests & setting up the procession of encounters.
4. Editors, where multiple players all work on the same combat/module at once google-docs style.

#1 and #2 are our baseline targets for launch; #3 and #4 are stretch goals that may come after the initial release on Steam.

Localization

The last section that the Massif loan covers is translating the game to other languages. Some research gave us an estimate of about $27k to localize a game of our size, and we’d like to launch in German and Brazilian Portuguese. I don’t have analytics set up yet for the game itself, but Germany and Brazil are the two biggest non-English sources for downloads of user-created content on mod.io:

Russian, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean would be the languages we’d look at for possibly adding in a post-launch update (funding permitting, at that point).

Wickworks is dead, long live Lacewing

When kicking off the Lancer Tactics kickstarter, I needed to move fast and didn’t know how large the project would end up being, so I organized everything under the LLC I already had for my solo games: Wickworks. However, as the project has progressed it’s become awkward to keep working under it because:

• Structure: Our vision for Lancer Tactics and the studio have grown beyond the “repository of solo projects” container of Wickworks. We’ve been having next-game talks & imagining games that have a team ready from the start instead of katamari’d along the way.
• Power: As writer of these updates, I’m already the public face of the game. We don’t need the company to also have been named & logo drawn by circa-2015 Olive. It would just be nice to keep finding ways to structurally de-center me.
• Personal: “Wick” is my deadname lol. Pro tip: don’t name your LLC after yourself if you’re planning on ever having a major gender revolution and shedding your old identity like the husk of an insect carapace.

With all that, we’ve been on the lookout for a new name for most of this year and finally settled on Lacewing. Many of my favorite names come from something being slightly misheard (part of my process in looking for a name is reading possibilities out loud to a friend), and Lacewing came from a mishear of “Laceworks” while going through a list of other “-works” words e.g. Spoolworks.

Here’s a quick selection of other names that we considered, pulled from our ideation document:

• Sanguine Hearts
• Redpetal Arts
• Rose Petal Games
• Tender Fragments
• Prismatic Alliance
• Ludolight
• Bandit Camp (I saw a roadside sign in Outward that said “East Bandit Camp ->” and am so taken with that being a diagetic name for a settlement)
• Stolen Kiss
• Armadillidiidae (“army-dilly-die-ah-day”, hard to read but fun to say)
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege (I was getting desperate)
• Blunderbus Games
• Bridge Aria Games
• Common Thread Games

Jonathan Caridia (creator of the Lancer Rules cheatsheet) is designing us a new studio logo! Here’s the stage 1 ideation sheet. We chose three of these to hone in on and flesh out.

AI Policy

Quick note ICYMI — we have a new AI content policy for maps, modules, and mods created for Lancer Tactics. You can read it in full at that link, but the TLDR is that we prohibit usage of LLM technologies at all steps of the design & development process, and will be taking down any user-created content that we learn used generative AI in its creation.

How to handle AI-generated slop is a problem the entire creative industry is currently grappling with. Itch.io has seen a doubling of game pages created in the past two months with no increase in downloads or purchases. AI submissions have been banned by this year’s IGF jury and Panic’s Playdate (though the latter seems to still allow code).

Some of the comments I see say that the solution is simple — just ban it — but any effective ban needs to also come with some sort of enforcement policy. I agree that the chilling effect of a ban alone is valuable, but it needs teeth in the form of a process for detecting and removing AI-generated content. And as Heather Flowers says, it’s the most difficult problem for moderating the modern internet. Content generation is fast and manually removing is slow.

Our strategy for Lancer Tactics is to try and nip it in the bud in the hope that not letting it get an initial foothold in our community will keep future moderation work manageable. A secondary platform outside of our control may someday emerge that hosts AI-generated mods for LT, but there’s not much we can do about that.

Conclusion

I’ve been swamped with business & HR stuff this month so this’ll be the first post since we started early access that doesn’t come with a corresponding update for the game. So it goes. See you next time!

Olive