I've been learning Godot in between drawing comic pages, hoping to translate Gemfarers into a videogame. One of the first issues that cropped up is that Gemfarers has always been about customization, due to starting as a miniatures game. Fortunately, I learned that 2D sprites have advanced quite a bit since I last looked into it. I spent an evening making a cut-out doll to practice with, and it turns out there are a lot more shared parts than I thought. So it looks like I can keep the same variety in a videogame.

The simplicity of the costumes also means they work at any size, so I can scale them for both on-field graphics and profile art (possibly with more detailed faces, if I can figure that out).  Elf hands and digitigrade feet won't require entirely new art. The ogres and some other creatures would require their own set of parts.

By using 2D skeletons, I can animate the dolls in the game engine, instead of having to draw frames. I will have to make front and back versions, though.

My current plans are to start with creating a dollmaker for the site, essentially a character creator game. Following that, I'd like to upgrade it to a dress-up game, where you play as a tailor making outfits for gemfarers that match their gemaster's aesthetic. This will give me an opportunity to work the kinks out of the dolls and animations before working on a larger game.

I am planning on doing a simple dungeon crawler next, with exploration in the style of Steven Universe Attack the Light. It would involve a team of four gemfarers, so I might incorporate the four face buttons on a controller with the character's positions in a diamond.

Once I have the character creator and dungeon crawler, I will use them as the basis for the actual Gemfarers strategy game. The dungeon crawling would be side quests a single unit of four gemfarers from your larger team can go on to strengthen their bonds.

I am looking forward to adding videogames to the Gemfarers canon, but I am still planning on releasing the tabletop version, probably without miniatures at first. Hopefully Gemfarers and Bear Corner can grow into an unwieldy ecosystem of nonsense. And I promise to keep all of it in online right here for as long as possible. 

So. Gemfarers.

I first started coming up with the idea of Gemfarers in 2015. I have been playing table-top miniature games since 2004, and longed for a proper Warcraft miniature war game. That never happened, so I made my own game. I wanted to blend the Warcraft aesthetic with magical girls and dapper outfits.

Originally, Gemfarers was set in space, hence the name. Adventurers would travel the stars using gems. I eventually decided to set it on a single fantasy world, and made it a parallel to Earth so I could create a queer-friendly fantasy world without losing queer history. Also superheroes.

The main theme of Gemfarers is having one large general commanding squads of petite troops. This is inspired somewhat by Warcraft, where commanders are typically scaled up to ridiculous heights. It's also inspired by my just liking size differences. The squad size was set at four, to mimic the five-man band trope. For example, in Sailor Moon or Samurai Troopers, there was a main team of five, with a further team of four that the leader would also fill the fifth slot for.

The general (called a gemaster) has a special assistant unit. This was originally lifted from another war game, Wargods of Aegyptus, where the priest unit existed solely to give buffs (and command archers, if you're short on commanders). I changed assistants over time to be more of a romantic partner, like Tuxedo Mask from Sailor Moon, or Pearl from Steven Universe.

I wrote up a draft of the rules over the course of a year, going through numerous iterations of how special attacks worked. They were always based on DiC Sailor Moon rules, where attacks usually had three words in their name, starting with the planet. Eventually I settled on a system where the first two words have no game effect. The finalized special powers use the naming scheme [Gem] [Talisman] [Power], where power is one of the special skills available in the rules. For example, one gemfarer's special attack might be "Jade Sword Slash".

There were a lot more pit stops along the way, but that's the gist of how I got from writing up Warcraft army lists to having the skeleton of a magical girl war game.