It started as a a joke about an OSR mech game, about a year ago. I was annoyed that every mech game I play is too big, too complex, too focused on customization and buildcraft and complicated combat systems that take hours. I was frustrated that all of them seem to be very intentionally and "sleekly" designed in a way that intentionally limits my ability to solve problems creatively, something that I quite enjoy doing in other games. I was in shock that nobody else thought Metal Warriors on the SNES was the coolest thing ever made.
So I started working on a game to address that. About seven rewrites and a solid chunk of playtesting later, I feel confident in saying that it's about as done as it's gonna get.
United in ARMS is a game that I struggle to call a passion project, even if I love it, because it was something that kept tripping me up along the way. Despite the stated goals of simplicity and fiction-first, it took me a lot of tries before I finally exorcised my reflexive inclusion of complex crit tables, multi-phase turns, and all other sorts of nonsense. Now, it does what I want it to do: provide a pretty simple, straight forward skeleton that I can bolt all the bullshit I'll ever want from a mech game onto, and it will never complain or break because there's barely anything in there to break.
I don't have much to say in this post, because I'm very happy with letting it speak for itself. I hope you read it, and if you do, I hope that you like it.
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