Week 4

Kryat

Miniature research

To start this week, I started thinking about how printing would work and what the miniatures would look like, so I looked at a website by the name of Hero forge. This website allows users to design custom dungeons and dragons miniatures.

I loaded up this website and looked through the possible customisation.

That includes basic things like face, legs, arms etc. but also a bunch of fantasy elements like wings, weapons etc. (Source: www.heroforge.com )

This is the base design, I investigated this and wanted to try and make my designs, more dynamic than just a simple stick figure, (which can be seen in my concept art.) This website allows you to pay to have the miniature you design printed. However, due to the rate this site charges I have decided against using the site to have the miniatures printed and just use this site as a purely research and idea generation platform.

As you can see below the lowest price for printing on the cheapest very brittle plastics is $20 so about £18 plus shipping from America which would be very expensive, Due to us wanting 4 player character miniatures as well as any other we decide upon in chats in the coming weeks the price would be well over £100 making it about £20 for each of us for 4 miniatures.

I used my above designs in order to use them as reference images when generating a more dynamic mock-up in Hero forge for inspiration.

This character is equipped with a knife as well as a bow and arrow in order to protect himself against the unpredictable dangers of the forest. I designed this concept using the site and this was the outcome. (Source: www.heroforge.com )

They carry a bow like in my concept however, this version has a quill filled with arrows which, is something I haven’t thought about in my original design.

The clothing is also the same as my design with the trench coat and the jumper/sweater underneath, the colours however are different as they are more natural colours which may help the character blend into the background when he’s hunting/looking for the creatures of the forest. The base has foliage to show that the character is in the forest and maybe other characters that are more equipped for other regions could have a base related to that area.

Polymer clay research

As well as looking into 3D printed miniatures I also wanted to investigate other forms of miniature making. I started off by looking around our design studio to find some clay, so I got to work and make a model reminiscent of my hunter design using the clay.

The clay model is way too large and is not made of the type of clay that hardens which is when a classmate suggested to me the use of polymer clay, which I had never heard of but once I had a google, I found the following information about polymer clay:

Polymer clay is an art medium that is known for its versatility, pliability and simplicity to work with. It is an oven bake modelling material composed of polymers, resins, colouring agents and fillers. Not a natural clay, it is man-made from a plastic.
One of the most popular brands of polymer clay is called “Sculpey”
“At Sculpey®, most of our clays have similar baking times. Each of the following requires 275 degrees F, or 130 degrees C, for 15 to 30 minutes per 1/4 inch of the clay thickness”

Sources: www.sculpey.com, https://polymerclaysuperstore.com/pages/polymer-clay-for- beginners#:~:text=Polymer%20Clay%20%28sometimes%20accidentally%20spelled%20polimer%20clay%29%20is,man-made%20from%20a%20plastic%2C%20polyvinyl%20chloride%20%28PVC%29%20base.

Polymer clay can be used to make my miniatures as an alternative to 3D printing as they can make simple models that can be hardened, painted and covered in a layer of sculpey glaze which can keep it shiny looking throughout its lifetime. Sculpey can be used to make models like the following images below (I do not have rights to these images they are from google just to illustrate how sculpey can be used)

I could use polymer clays to make the miniatures for the game, However, how brittle they are when hardened is yet to be seen and because we are aiming our game towards a family friendly audience there is high risk that if they are brittle than can easily be destroyed.

3D Scanning

In order to tackle the potential fact of the polymer sculpey clay figures being too brittle, I investigated the possibility of 3D scanners that can scan an object and output a signal to a computer.

They work by using lasers to create highly dense point clods or polygon meshes that can be converted into a CAD compatible file for use on 3D modelling software like Blender.

Change of idea

After the rules were thought about in the late days of week 3 me and my group discussed the possibility of different gameplay mechanics. A lot of the mechanics stated were very confusing in the first draft and the rule set was built for the idea of having 4 separate decks of cards for each one of the regions of Kryat that Jake (the designer) designed those being:

Tundra
Taiga
Swamp
Prism Tree

However, due to time constraints we realised that we would not be able to make the number of cards needed for 4 decks before March 25th which was the internal deadline, we set to have all the cards done by. This changed the idea of the game to focus on one region for the vertical slice which we decided to be the forest and with this change came many mechanical and gameplay changes. The biggest change is that in the previous idea of this card/boardgame the player would gain points from the different rarities of creatures that they capture however now the gameplay focuses on players collecting die which they can get as a reward from capturing creatures to either have the most dice wins win condition or have some sort of major boss creature that the player goes up against.

Set up:
O
Hand of 5(?) dice
O
Deck of Creatures
First player draws card
Needs to roll specified dice in order
to capture
More basic creatures (common,
uncommon) can have lower

First test of game play

For this first play test of “Kryat” we decided to focus on testing the capture mechanics and collecting of die and losing of die from capturing said creatures, the ratios and maths for what die you get and/or lose was determined by our group lead Logan and me and the rest of the team along with some outside help from other second year students just played it in order to test how the core game play loop of the game (capturing creatures and fighting grand boss) felt.

From this first play test we found that:

The Grand beasts health was too low, with it being set to 100 and the number of players we tested with being 4 most players didn't get a chance to attack the beast before someone, usually the person who attacked it first or the person after them killed it.
We also found out that the whole keeping and losing die mechanic had a major fault as because if people started with one of each die type (d4-d10) they would lose there only one of a specific die type if they failed to capture a creature and not be able to attempt to capture others that required a role from that die type which cause players to be in a losing loop and not being able to get anymore creatures and not being able to make any sort of comeback.

Improvements

In order to improve on our game from our findings we changed the grand beasts health to be doubled to 200 which fixed the issue of not everyone getting a chance on the boss as the higher health meant that no matter how many die the player had or how lucky they were they couldn't kill the beast in one go meaning other players got a chance to attack it if they wished to.

In terms of the die losing loop issue we decided to change the way die collecting/losing works with now the players needing to have at least one of each die type (d4-d10) this meant that players could always have at least one chance at any of the creatures and not be stuck and not be able to progress and now instead of losing a die if the die they are meant to lose is their only die of that type they will not lose it and the next persons turn starts.