I've spent a lot of evenings in MechWarrior Online, and two projects came out of it. LanceDeck is a tracker that turns the in-game scoreboard into a proper team board. MECHFALL is my own mech action-RPG, and it's slowly becoming a real game.
LanceDeck watches your screen while you play. It reads the scoreboard, the lance panel, the Q overlay and the target readouts, and builds a live page for your team. It only looks at pixels. It never reads the game's memory, presses keys for you or talks to the game servers.
1. Download the latest release zip and unzip it anywhere you like. 2. Run LanceDeck.exe. An icon shows up in the system tray and the setup page opens in your browser. 3. Type your pilot name, check the game folder is right, and click Save & import. From then on, just start LanceDeck before you drop.
Windows only. Unofficial, free, not affiliated with or endorsed by Piranha Games Inc.
MECHFALL is an isometric action-RPG. You play a human pilot who builds a war machine and keeps rebuilding it part by part, fighting your way up through a far-future galaxy that couldn't care less if you live. It's early days: pre-alpha, built in Unity 6.
Playable: a combat slice in Unity. Move, fire, packs that swarm, loot that drops, a first city block with destructible buildings, and the five mech classes walking, running and firing.
Designed: the game bible, the five classes, weapon kits and skill trees, pilot tree, progression, environment grammar and a production plan.
Not yet: the full loot loop, a vertical slice with a boss, and real sound and music. That's probably my next year of evenings.
MECHFALL gets my evenings and weekends, and that's it. Getting from here to a playable demo needs more time, plus some money for art, a composer and maybe a second pair of hands. Coffees on Ko-fi help with that. The vote below decides which class I build out first.
Tap a class to vote. You get one vote a day, and I only keep the count.
Art from the current build, one per class, with the pilot standing next to it for scale. They all handle differently and treat the city differently. The Overseer never goes anywhere without its drones.
The first chapter starts in a rotting industrial city. I build each district out of painted blocks like these.
Humanity owns the stars. Most of them are graves. Here's enough of the setting to get a feel for it. I've kept the plot off this page on purpose, and even the game never fully explains the Machine.
Thousands of years from now humanity has spread across a vast network of settled systems, and has never found another civilisation. Every city, fleet, ruin, religion and war in known space is human in origin, or comes from the machines humanity built.
Technology became miraculous; life did not. The rich replace organs and grow new bodies. A mining moon one jump away loses a generation to bad water. Famine, plague, debt bondage, trafficking, clan war and black-market surgery came to the stars with everyone else.
Beyond the human wars is a fourth force: autonomous machine armies directed by an intelligence whose origin, objective and true scale are unknown. No faction can prove whether it is one intelligence or many, a forgotten human weapon, or something humanity built by accident. Most people simply call it the Machine.
A modern mech thinks faster than its pilot. To keep up, humanity wires machine processors, software and neural interfaces into people. The best pilots no longer control their mech; they wear it.
The Helix Directorate, a corporate-technocratic federation: civilisation survives when competent people control systems, information and capital. The Covenant of Sol, an ancient military-political order: humanity survives through duty, law, sacrifice and continuity. The Vagrant Synod, a loose network of fleets, cells and free systems: rigid systems collapse, and survival belongs to whoever adapts faster than chaos. You pick one, around level 10. None of them is the good one.
A poor peripheral world, recently shattered by precision orbital strikes nobody can account for. You are not a hero, a soldier or a famous pilot — you are trying to survive. A badly damaged combat mech falls out of the sky nearby; its pilot lives just long enough to leave you fragments that contradict each other. With hostile forces closing in, you climb into the cockpit, and the machine accepts the connection when it should not.
Who made the Machine, why it lets you in, what the factions look like behind their public faces, and where four acts of campaign end. All of it is written. None of it is going on a web page.
Johnson