Description

The combat game Jumpsuit uses approximations of physical systems to structure players’ tactical planetside jetpack combat, as well as a heavily abstracted player-guided campaign system to represent the overall course of a planetbound conflict.

In Jumpsuit, players manage and control one or more individual infantry combatants in quasi-aerial (jetpack) land battles on a planet in its early stages of colonization by other colonized worlds. Fighting for two or more opposing sides, players butt heads in an ongoing planet-based low-scale military campaign for settlement sites and resource extraction points ranging across the surface of the planet. As the campaign progresses, players can fill out their rosters of troops and equipment, training soldiers for service in specialized missions and requesting and receiving special-purpose hardware and software.

The overall course of the conflict is set by the players, who act behind the scenes to guide their faction’s overall strategic aims. Players may attempt to ‘buy’ strategic developments, whether geographic gains on a battle map or technical developments of military hardware, by incurring in-game costs measured in specific tactical mission successes under narrowly tailored conditions, representative of a supporting campaign of similar missions. The opposing player, then, may attempt to hamper or prevent such a development, again by incurring a mission cost. Players may establish new outposts, which can be captured as strongpoints and for their resources, and may operate manufacturing plants and research and development facilities to support the war effort.

Modifiers to technical support actions such as manufacturing and research arise from the geographic and military situation on the abstracted strategic map, which can be changed in its military aspect by players’ strategic developments, whether physically or technically. Similarly, modifiers to upcoming missions arise from past missions, and opposing players’ goals in tactical battles may be widely divergent depending on their overall war aims, which will often center on considerations of supply.

Initiative-based tactical battles take place on a hex-gridded battle board between multiple jumpsuit combatants individually controlled by the players, sometimes in conjunction with semicontrolled aligned vehicles and facilities. Jumpsuit represents essential physical elements of three-dimensional combat, including gravity, thrust, and inertia (including leading), but focuses on balancing faithful three-dimensional combat with considerations of speedy play, allowing most squad-level battles to finish in about an hour.