Journey Into the Carniverse – Developer Interview
Back on July 30, I unveiled a really cool Kickstarter called The Carniverse. In today’s post, I dive a little deeper into that game with an interview with its author. If you have not heard of the game, it is a 28mm miniatures skirmish game where you try to survive in a modern land of dinosaurs. If you haven’t checked out the Kickstarter page, be sure to do so.
This Kickstarter is already funded and ends on August 29, 2019 at 7:25am EDT.
In the text below, I posted my questions in bold and Nick Wilkins’ (the designer of Carniverse) responses in italics. Now, please join me for part one of the Carniverse Interview.
The Carniverse Interview
Hi Nick,
Thank you very much to agreeing to an interview about your first ever Kickstarter campaign. For a first ever Kickstarter campaign, it has been doing very well and is already funded.
Thanks for talking to me about it, the entire process has been pretty humbling so far.
I have to say that I really enjoyed the game when I gave it a try with you at a local gaming convention, and am very happy to see your campaign doing so well.
I’m glad you had an opportunity to try it out prior to launch, hopefully that was just your first game of many.
Without further ado, I would like carry on with the interview.
The Carniverse World
For those not familiar with Carniverse, can you tell us about the world and game setting?
The Carniverse (while a game) is at its core a story about people, and their survival when the world they know gets flipped on its head. It’s set in modern day, and is relatively location agnostic so that anyone playing it can make it familiar and local to them, or they can place it wherever in the world they want to set it in. The idea is that the events taking place in the game are new, its the first days, weeks, and months of the new world, what started out as dinosaur sightings being taken as jokes or hoaxes has turned into people running from their home as its being torn apart by a hungry Tyrannosaurus. So from a plot point people don’t really know what’s going on or why, where the dinosaurs came from, or how to stop them, they’re merely trying to survive any way they can. The fluff throughout the book will slowly lead to some clues as to the future of the world, but you’ll have to read them to find that out. But picture the chaos and lack of preparation that would accompany the fall of society in the first days, and that’s basically the setting. But with dinosaurs!
What size of table and miniatures do you need to play?
The game was designed to be played on a 3′ x 3′ table with 28mm miniatures.
A scene from a Carniverse game in progress. Gotta love gaming with dinosaurs!
The Inspiration
What inspired you to create this gaming world?
Wow, where to start. There’s a lot of influences that went into making this. Obviously Jurassic Park is one, and there was an old set of trading cards in the 80’s called Dinosaurs Attack which really caught my attention at a young age. I’ve always been intrigued about how small we are in comparison to them, and how lucky we are that we don’t share a world with dinosaurs anymore. But I was tossing around game mechanics that I’ve enjoyed over the years (X-Com, D&D, etc) at the same time that I’d decided to re-watch the Jurassic Park movies. My son had just started to walk and during one of the movies he stumbled across the basement while basically strangling a stuffed T-Rex while yelling in its face, and I realized that man vs dinosaur was 100% the theme I wanted to go with. Dinosaurs are also something that is weirdly under represented in gaming, especially when you consider how amazing of a thing they are to literally everyone at a young age.
Character Development
One of the things that has me very excited about this game is that you have a campaign system. Can you tell us a little bit about team creation and character progression through the game?
For sure, the game is truly at its best when played in a campaign. This goes back to my love of RPG’s and really wanting to see progression and growth, while having some measure of control over those things. Players start with a point pool to build their team much like any wargame. You choose your leader and the rest of the characters that make up your starting team, then give them some gear. Most of the characters allow you to select which skill paths they’ll be able to progress in as they level up so you have some control in how they’re built. They also each start with some special skill that sets them apart from one another. Currently, if you include the Tales of Survival mini expansion going to all backers, the game has 4 leaders, and 18 different character types to choose from. During your games characters can sustain long term injuries affecting their battlefield ability, they can find new gear, they can even die, but most of them should jump some levels before anything truly horrific happens to them. There’s 10 levels that they can earn experience towards, and at each one they can choose to roll for a base attribute increase, or roll on one of the skill paths available to them. With a little luck, even the lowliest of characters can turn into hardened combat veterans as they get more experience under their belts.
This character gains experience as he takes out some dinosaurs.
Base Building
When we played the Demo game earlier, you alluded to the fact that your team can build a base. Can you talk to that or give us any teasers on what we can expect when we buy the book?
Base building is really neat, and its a throwback to the X-Com series of games where upgrading your base would offer you different in game perks and so on. In the Carniverse each team starts with the same blueprint for their base. It can support 6 characters, is self sustaining with no upkeep costs, and has 4 build slots for facilities. There are 10 different facilities that you can choose to build, each one offering you different advantage or perk, there’s also the option to expand that base (in Tales of Survival) allowing you to build even further. Each facility allows for a certain number of characters to work it between games, and they also come with an upkeep cost. Upkeep costs come out of your Resource Pool after each scenario, and if you can’t afford to pay them then you base begins to sputter and fail as systems shut down. So while having the bonuses of those facilities is great, most of them also come with a drawback if you cannot afford them. Careful planning when building your base is very important so that it doesn’t become an anchor for your team. Having said that, there’s living quarters to increase your team size, training rooms to raise experience points between games, material salvage allowing you to turn unneeded equipment into resources, and a surgery centre to try and mitigate injuries received to your characters just to name a few. It’s an area of the game that I expect to grow quite a bit over time.
In Carniverse, you build a base to give your team advantages against the others on the field.
Wrapping it up…
I have to thank Nick Wilkins again for the time that he took to answer my questions about The Carniverse. This game looks really cool and I plan to take a look at a copy of the game for when it comes out. If this game interests you, be sure to check out The Carniverse Kickstarter before it finishes on August 29, 2019.
If you like this article, you can catch this article in its entirety on Must Contain Minis. I also have a Battle Report of the game up on my site.
Thanks for reading and until next time, Happy Gaming Everyone!!!
Read more about great Indy and Historical games on my site!
Must Contain Minis is my personal Website. If you like this post, be sure to check out my site. You can also follow me on Social Media. I am very active on Facebook and share posts of a wide variety. I upload my best pictures to Instagram and am fairly active on Twitter.
My aim is to promote gaming with companies outside of those that already dominate the gaming market. You can find a wide variety of games there from Indy to Historical.
