Easter Break

Kryat

This week was the start of the Easter break however, i continued to do work threw this break in order to get more done.

Charge Counters (detailed)

One of the most notable things i started doing this break was designing counters for the charges as after having a discussion with the group about how charges would be counted/overseen to make sure no =one cheats, others can see etc.

The idea of 3D printed counters came up, which i immediately agreed to as it adds tactileness to the game and allows me to complete one of my personal goals of improving my 3D model, Originally the charges would have been tracked with a piece of paper that was laminated so the players could easily wipe away the pen used however, i suggested that this idea didn't look very professional and show good knowledge of the pipeline so 3D printed counters became the idea for how they would be tracked.

There was many different ideas amongst the group for what the counters should look like one suggested idea was to have the same symbol as the charge bottle card that Kate and Logan designed that allows the player to use the cards ability to gain 2 charges.

This idea would have worked for a counter design however I suggested that the counters designs should be unique to the player characters for example the hunters counter being something like a bow or an arrow, the thief being a knife or a bag of stolen die etc. something that each of the characters would carry with them or would relate to them.

This idea was loved by the group so i started doing some blender mock ups of some ideas for the counters designs. The images you see below are some designs i did for the Hunters' counters and the Thieves

The one on the left being the thieves counter design and the one on the right being the hunters. However, these designs do look good due to us wanting to get these 3D printed these design were not very practical as especially the hunters with the leaning arrows would need a lot of supports and would be very brittle due to the imagined size of these counters and also due to the level of detail especially in the thief counter design with the die that has the defined dots on it that would not be viable on a 3D print of the imagined size and also due to time and needing about 10 of each counter type having something too detailed like these would not work, so i started to look into redesigning them.

Charge Counters (simplified)

It was suggested by the group that maybe the counters should be more simplistic and not have too much detail so that players for one know what counters are supposed to be for which character and secondly so that these counters can be printed in batches without taking too much time and losing too much detail.

At this stage i decided on a design template of having the flat base from the above designs but having the symbol/item sit flush horizontally on top of the base this is so that it looks more like a typical counter than a vertical one would be. I went for the following symbols for each character:

Hunter - Arrow
Thief - Knife/dagger
Ranger - Flintlock pistol
Medic - Needle

i am super proud with my blender work here however, two of these designs those being the two in the middle the needle and the gun don't look great and caused my group to decide to try and change the design and for me to put some more effort into getting the designs to work, my group suggested the change of the gun to be a rope like lasso type thing and the medics counter to be the stereotypical medics cross, i was sceptical of these changes at first due to the medieval/middle ages theme we were going for because that red cross used to symbolise hospitals was not first used until the crusades in the 16th century (1500 - 1600) however, due to time constraints and poor planning i didn't really see an alternative for the medic symbol for the counter and just went with the idea of the red cross because at least that way players can easily tell that those counters are for the medic character.

So following these ideas i changed the needle and gun models above from their unpolished quick rushed look to a more refined and become the cross and rope, these redesigns actually helped improve my skills for 3D modelling which is what i wanted to achieve as i had to use a you tube how to guide fro getting the spiral shape as part of the rope counter design.

The only problem with this design especially the rope is because of its detail it may not print on the 3D printer properly however, if i comes to it i can redesign the rope to print better.

Thief polymer clay model

Also this week i started the development of the Thief model and unfortunately i had some problems whist creating this model due to trying to get the sneaky pose that the character is in this caused the head and rest of the body to be too heavy which caused the model to fall over during baking.

This issue occurred because the head was too heavy which even tho the clay cures and stiffens and sets into place after baking during baking if one part is too heavy this failure will happen in the oven.

In order to fix this issue i had to change the pose of the character so that there could be some more support whist its baking in the oven so as you can see from the videos below i kept the character in a hunched sneaky pose to keep the dynamic however now instead of having one hand on a bag and one hand on a knife the character is holding a knife in one hand and a knife in the other as if they are about to strike in some sort of mid attack pose.

Once, i had got the model to balance during baking it perfectly cook and cured ready for painted, i painted the clothing in accordance with the research and concepts i completed. For example the silver mask based off the Astaroth mask and the clock/hood based off the cos player and assassins creed.

Player mats

Our game has a lot of things that the player needs to keep track of including their hand, their own discard pile, their die, Charge counters and their model so in order to make this easier to manage for the players i came up with the idea of designing player mats for each character that the player can use.

Originally, the idea was to have the mat be A3 size but after looking online and finding the average size for a playing card (US game size cards (55.9mm x 87.1mm, 2.2" x 3.43") ) because our cards will be eventually professionally printed by an american company i realised that the sizing of the cards would work for A4 and not take up too much of the mat and cover up the concept art that i want to have in the background of the mat to show the character.

i decided on A4 as the page size i looked at different possible layouts and settled with the one below of having artwork in the background and sections to place the different things such as cards in your hand and discard pile however, i was not too sure what orientation would suit the player mats more horizontal or vertical so i made some paper concepts

Looking at these designs for layouts from a graphical design stand point the vertical mat suits the player mat due to the rule of thirds separating all the key areas of the mat with the character name and charges being in top third, image in the middle and the discard and hand piles in the bottom third however, for practically i dont think the vertical style just due to layout of all the players around each other on a table. Horizontal style however would be more practical with spacing and giving the player a larger side of the paper to put their hand on

Hunter player mat

below is a the design of the hunter loosely based off my change of design of the character to be an older man because of model issues stated in earlier weeks and then also the first player mat i made using that image and my concept layouts in combination with logans background of a forest.

The idea of having logans "placeholder" image as the background is that its blurry in comparison as then the player easily overlooks it making the mats more effective for game play because the imagery is not too strong and take away from the wording on the mat that shows the player where to place things as well as the charges/abilities information.

i also wanted the character to be a different art style as the background to make it kinda look simuler to a Pokemon fight encounter like the screen grab below where the background is kind of blurred and the characters are in the foreground.

Counter model/printing Issues

During the start of the Easter break i got in contact with the people on avenue campus that ran the 3D printing lecture that i attended early weeks into the project who were apart of the digital humanities faculty of the uni who allowed me to book out their 3D printers, Luke (the lecturer) talked me through how to set up a print through a platform called Cura using the stl files of my blender models together we sized the counters down to about 3 CM in size so basically no bigger than a two pence coin.

I lined up some test prints to see if the prints would work i lined up the hunter arrow counter and the medic cross, the following image is of those test prints however what you may notice is that the arrow is slightly smaller than the cross despite being both set to 3 cm in size this is because the platform sees that the parts of the arrow overhang the base and counts that as the edge of the print.

After, this Luke took my stl files and Cura project files and qued them for batch printing however, a few days later i got an email explaining how due to the design the rope failed as well as the dagger so what i had to do was redesign them but due to the rope piece being so thin i explained the possibility to the group of changing the ranger counter to a flintlock pistol as originally intended but developed further using research from you tube and i also redesigned the dagger so that it could sit flush and print properly.

Whist making these the files got corrupted and i had to download and use software to fix them and then got another email from Luke explaining how the new knife can be printed using water soluble support because the blade is slightly raised and that because the end of the gun model was hollowed it could not print correctly because the wall of it would be less than 1/10th of a mm thick causing the print to fail so in order to fix this i had to redesign the gun model so it was solid and then got that sent off as a Cura file back to Luke ready for printing, where the next day i went to pick up and was presented with the following counters that needed a bit of touch up and being soaked in water but after that they were ready.