Greater Space Battles: Art & Ship Design

I drew and inked the picture below over the last two nights, intended for my solo game Greater Space Battles.  I'm not 100% in love with it, but for my second attempt ever at inking with steel nibs and brush in the comic book style, I'm moderately pleased.  I'm learning a ton about the process; for example, I figured out I was holding the nibbed pen like a pencil when I needed to decrease the angle to be more parallel with the paper.  A vast improvement in ink flow!  The picture below just seems to be lacking some dynamism.  I know what I was trying to do: I wanted to show a bright heavy contrast effect due to the energy blast between the ships and resulting explosion.  I just don't have the skills yet to capture that effect solely in black and white.  Maybe I will color the picture and see if that adds some vitality.

I've continued to playtest the game, just finishing turn 8.  The changes I recommended last post have helped immensely.  The contest is very close and feels very objective.  I'm normally opposed to lots of die rolls, but this game needs them.  The abundance of randomization makes it very hard to "pick a side".  It's more like managing the chaos, with just enough decision making to make it fun.

I neglected to mention ship design in the rules download.  Design your own ship by first picking a ship size.  Then choose the six letter sequence for each of the ship's five energy allocation schemes (A=Attack, D=Defense, M=Movement).  The schemes have no restrictions; if you want to design a ship with six "A"s in a row for three different energy channels, feel free.  Of course that ship may have a lot of firepower but it will have trouble defending itself or even moving.  After the five energy channels, choose the ship's firing arcs.  The number featured on the Vector/Readout Disc for each arc indicates the max energy that you can allocate to attacks in that arc during a turn.  The ship's size limits the sum of all the firing arc values.  The sum of all firing arc values of size 0 ships cannot exceed 4, the sum for size 1 ships cannot exceed 8.  The maximum value for size 2 ships is 12, 16 for size 3 and 20 for size 4.  Finally, name your ship and the design is complete.  Make up your own Vector/Readout Disc using the template on the downloads page and you are off.