Making some digital sculpt and probably a wargame related to said minis

I once again got obsessed with minis. Specifically, in having my character in three dimensional space. Also I managed to understand how to use my new favorite sculpting software, NomadSculpt. With its power combined with a 10 days vacation, I managed to create my first set of commercial printable miniatures.
That's right! This blog has already a sponsor, and that sponsor is me! Go buy this sweet Miner Homunculus Kit, available both on Itch dot io and Cults3D!

Promo image for the Minis release

 

But how did we get here, and why Miner Homunculus? Time to go back into a time called December 2020.
Back then I wanted to make a wargame with cool and quirky factions, but kinda stopped there after attending a workshop where the first teaching was not to start from the factions for designing the game. Regardless I had some cool ideas for the faction which were:

• The Knightess faction, where one big 3 meter tall lady spawned 2+ meter tall cool knight ladies ready to fend off to opponent, as a mimic of Space Marines.
• The Worker Bees, a pseudo-communist faction obsessed with rebellion, freedom and being equal, lead by those who were the most equal among them.
• The Terracotta orcs, a community of orcs and goblins that learnt a way to achieve immortality by reincarnating as clay and being molded into new being, sometimes by mixing each other out, but losing previous memory each time.
• An Angelic faction (only thought of, never drawn), filled with eldritch horrors and the usual biblically accurate angels.
• A Techno-capitalist faction (only thought of, never drawn), which would have been a copy of Borderlands' (the videogame) Hyperion.

2020 designs of Knightess, Worker Bees and Terracotta Orcs

2022 Knightess designs

But now I have better ideas for base mechanics (at least i hope so). I am writing a new skirmish game, where the objective would be for anybody to design their faction by giving some degree of design space and a CC-BY license. You can find the current sketched version on this link.

The current mechanics idea are the following:

• You start only with your leader miniature on the field. The objective is to kill off/destroy the one of your opponent. You will be playing other units (of 1 or more models) as action of your leader. Think of this idea like playing cards in Duelyst. This allows some design space by having units outside the field and having "Enter the Battlefield"/"On Destroy" effects akin to card games.
• Using a Shared Resource System. To play units or make them attack, you are required to pay Action Points. Instead of having a fixed amount that goes up each turn, you can pay any amount, but if you go negative, your opponent takes their turn and gains that much Action Point they can use for their plan. I stole the idea from the Digimon TCG.
• The rest is mixing up roll over mechanics with fewer models and some of wounds tracking.

The Homunculus, as you could have imagined at this point, are derived fromt the Worker Bees. I thought instead of having an existing species under slavery from the bad guys because plot, I thought instead of doing the "artifical life that rebels from its creator" trope instead.