Orion Skies

   TL;DR: I’m planning to make Lua mods to bring a number of Ares features onto CFO. These mods will be usable with the Override scenario and will take on a life of their own beyond Ares.    With the new “Modbox” channel on the Evocation Games Discord server , discussion looks to start really heating up around modding for Cosmic Frontier . And although I’m intentionally keeping my plans for Orion Skies very flexible at this point, I do have specific plans to first create an adaptation of Ares for CFO, along with accompanying Lua-feature mods. I figured this is a good time to share more details of what the Ares adaptation and its Lua mods will entail. Ares    Ares is a 2D space action game, released by Ambrosia back when the EV series was current, with very similar overall physics to the EV series. The biggest gameplay difference is that, instead of making your way as a private citizen in the galaxy, you are leading military forces in a structured campaign to liberate the Earth

   This month, I went down a rabbit hole of ideas based on Magic: the Gathering, which ultimately led me to start work on a weapons & outfits generator !    In last month's blog post, I wrote about designing "cubes" in Magic: the Gathering, and about how I felt in some ways cubes are analogous to TCs, and how some aspects of cube design can transfer to TC design; I also wrote about ideas for Orion Skies from the paradigm of cube design.   One set of concepts that I use when designing cubes, I call "MSCTT". That stands for "Mechanics, Synergies, Counters, Tradeoffs, and Tension". These ideas help me design interesting interactions between the cards in a cube so that the cards can be woven by players into interesting deck strategies & matchups.   The concepts of "MSCTT" are very heavily based on the specific ways in which Magic's strategy is designed. I ended last month's blog post with the idea that I would have to spend some