When we decided to build a campaign for Powargrid instead of keeping it as a purely abstract tactical game, I designed a backstory for Globkar, the world where our blobbies live. The main driver behind that backstory was to have an explanation for the most obvious of our gameplay features; the lack of moving units. This turned out to be very fertile ground for world building, so during the campaign you can learn the backstory about our blobbies' strange way of waging war.
Since looking for internally consistent reasons for game play features gets the creative juices flowing, I looked for more of these features to incorporate into the story. And instead of looking at our most distinctive feature, I picked one of the most common things in games: restarting a mission. So, without further ado, meet Quod, the tech blobbie who will send you back in time if you are defeated in a mission.
He's even nicer than is fellow blue blobbie Grak but has a more sciency and experimental bend. As in that he likes to run experiments. On unfortunate recruits. Like you.
Did we really need extra this content? No, not really. There are hardly any games that give you any sort of explanation about why you can retry after you lose; it's just part of games, or at least the games that don't have permadeath. But I really like the completeness this brings to the Powargrid campaign (also, in breaking news, there is a slight chance I'm weird :). Also, the downside for people who aren't interested in reading Quod's dialogues is minimal, since all dialogues can be quickly clicked away. For the visuals we (of course) added a recruit-grinding time machine in the background and Michiel added some nice special effects to your travels in time.
In all, I'm very happy with how Quod turned out. Especially since creating Quod also ended up influencing some of our campaing design, making this a nice recursive process.
If you're curious, you can give our Powargrid demo a try at www.powargrid.com/play. You'll just have to lose a mission to meet Quod :).
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