https://stardust.sublightgames.com
Hey! I've been gone from here a loooooooooong time, and I've been up to a fair bit while I've been gone. Largely driven to love miniatures gaming by Brikwars itself, I've pursued an interest in not just playing miniatures games, but creating them as well.
To this end, along with my friend Faith, we established Sublight Games together in 2021, and we've been deep in work ever since on our debut project, Stardust. Stardust is a tactical space combat miniatures game set in the 1:285 scale, and primarily played on a hex grid, though I've made sure to write rules to ensure it can be played without a hex grid as well. We envision Stardust as a relatively grounded Science Fiction setting, but we take great care to tell an interesting story with interesting characters and factions first and foremost.
Disclaimer: all photos of gameplay are using prototype materials from playtesting sessions, and do not represent final products.
We've poured a considerable amount of effort into this game, not only to make it look good and the lore interesting, but simply to make the game fast, lightweight, easy to play, while retaining the kind of depth that allows a skilled player to take control of a match. To that end, the miniature bases themselves drive much of the gameplay. As a miniatures game player myself, I understood from the jump that bookkeeping is the enemy of fun.
The less time you spend marking things down on a sheet, the more time you can just play the game. As such, any gameplay relevant values, such as for the hybrid newtonian movement system, are on the miniature base itself. Speed, direction, and elevation can be quickly modified by the player, and the table state of any unit can be determined at a glance by anyone.
Paint job courtesy of our house painter, Daniel Finn.
Even the Newtonian flight system is essentially optional. Each ship gets a Flight Assist value, a combination of their various movement stats, which enable them to, below that speed, fly their ship like an airplane. We've found many can be intimidated by a full Newtonian movement system. This hybrid Flight Assist system provides an effective entry point for new players that is intuitive, while retaining more advanced movement for veteran players, without requiring two distinct rulesets.
The miniatures are all of an original design, inspired by a great many science fiction icons, as well as real life fighter jets. Most ships are also capable of atmospheric flight, indicated by the wide presence of airfoils, which has its own module of rules as well. There are roughly 30~ unique miniatures in the game currently, spread throughout the 5 major factions, and 2 minor factions.
For the purposes of enabling easier and more frequent playtesting, I also imported Stardust into Tabletop Simulator! This is an older version of the game, but the core set of rules remains the same, with mostly alterations in the form of balance adjustments for the upcoming 0.9 pre-release build that are missing from the TTS build. However, the TTS version is completely playable in its current state.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/ ... 2907782651
The mod for TTS is free, but in order to try and garner a little bit of monetary support prior to launch, all we ask for access to the rules is to subscribe as a Voidfarer on our website, for $5. This also gets you a discount on any of the merch in our store, which is also something we use to generate a little bit of extra cash to help us pay rent and bills so we can spend more time on the game. Support is optional but appreciated.
https://stardust.sublightgames.com
Honestly though, I'm pretty bad at this whole advertising thing. I mostly am just giddy to talk about the game at all, its been a true labor of love going way back before the creation of Sublight Games as a whole. The Stardust website also has a large number of lore articles and dev blogs, written by both Faith and myself, so I definitely encourage you to read those as well. We're just two broke trans women trying to make something awesome that we believe in.
I appreciate if even one person is inspired to check it out. Thank you.
You'll also see some actual Brikwars content coming from me here soon, as my girlfriend and her partner/my roommate are looking to start playing here soon, hence my presence in the first place.
- Rosalind Muchmore, Lead Game Developer at Sublight Games
