@voxel_pirate haha for sure, you’re on the list! release will be not that soon as there is still a lot to work on, but as you mentioned good beer helps to accelerate the process! …obwohl wir als schweizer sind ja da nicht so versiert, ihr habt da doch das eine oder andere gebräu das mir noch besser schmeckt!
@SteveAdamo haha yeah that board game fuss was totally serious… and indeed, scenography is kind of a strange field of arts but it was a great field of study. (…and i will tell phil he has to introduce himself a bit more professional! )
Now let’s recap the last weeks progress with some thoughts and WIP pictures of our board game development so i can get you up to speed. This stuff will be posted over at http://gnarlyroot.com as well but i can’t ask you to head over all the time so i will share it here too. i would love to hear your feedback on the subjects you like and i will try to stay open on any constructive suggestions.
3d Printed Parts as Inspiration for Board Game Concepts
As some of you know all has started here! yes here on this awesome inspiring place, so i have to thank you guys and the radiant team for getting me into this. As you know i really love to work with Qubicle Constructor and i can’t wait to do more voxel worx but with the upcoming idea of creating a board game i was aware that there will be a lot of other things that has to be defined first before i can come back and do the artwork and the final design.
I have worked sporadically with different 3d modeling software like Z-brush, Autodesk Inventor or SketchUp but i think for a person who doesn’t have any experience in this field, modeling with voxels is by far the easiest approach to dip a first toe into creating 3d models. You do nothing more or less than adding a bunch of 3d-cubes together. You don’t have this usually pretty a steep learning curve to get to know the overwhelming palette of tools and functions to start with, there are just a few simple tools. Of course this means this technique has its limitation so you can’t do round edges or real organic designs and the look of the models is usually pretty 8bit age style, but as i did mention, it’s great zero point to think and create with a software in three dimensional space… and hey who wouldn’t love 8bit pixelated stuff anyway!
Now after a few really fun sessions of creating stuff for Stonehearth with QC i had some digital files slumbering on my disk and a long time ahead of waiting till i can use them in-game… so what to do? I wanted to go one step further and was wondering how my models would look like in real life. I did export a few models as STL files and did feed these to our 3d printer at the workshop. After an hour i had the first little sword and bow pieces in my hands and immediately continued to load and print more stuff over night. A few posts above you can see some of my voxel models and the appropriate 3d prints in white ABS plastic. The sword, bow and knight are straight out of the printer and only coated with a white acrylic primer. The tiny taverna scene pieces are sanded, primed and then painted with acrylic colors.
While playing with my new gadgets i was thinking it would be amazing to create customized digital models (figures, board tiles, tokens, etc.) that can be 3d printed at every gamers home (or ordered trough a 3d-printing services) and be played as a board- or tabletop game on a real table right away. I’m aware that this idea is not new at all but i really do see a great potential in using 3d prints for creating custom board- or tabletop games. At least for me as an avid tabletop gamer since childhood it’s a very interesting field to do some more researches. I hope i didn’t bore you too much with my way of getting into this field but this is how it has all started for me. And no worries you can be sure to see a lot more pictures than words in my future updates as i’m usually more the WIP picture sharing guy.
What do you think? I would love to hear from you what you’re thinking about 3d printing and board games or maybe the change 3d prints could bring into the gaming culture in general?
i’m not a huge board gamer myself, but its painfully obvious how hungry the market is, given the average size of the campaigns i’ve seen on KS…
“we’re asking for 10k to fund our little project.”
six days later
“so, we’re at our 1.2 million stretch goal. thanks all!”
having said that, i think you are definitely onto something here, assuming a means to cost effectively produce the models (developer) or access them from a store/create them themselves (player)… can’t wait to see where this heads!
… might be an interesting option (if you know someone in the US). Starting a campaign @ Kickstarter to see if there is demand and how big it is. With some good feedback, maybe even one of the producers of 3D-printer might jump on the waggon .
P.S. Note to myself… it is tooo easy to enthuse me ,
I think froggy should send you his Stonehearth chess set for you to sell ( He gets loyalties or whatever) and pepe could become the official Stonehearth merchandise seller. It would be amazing business for all involved.
P.S. Remember Pepe stonehearth needs to be a mixture of games like Risk, Catan and Dungeons and Dragons. My suggestion is created a city building boarding game where depending on how many baracks’ you have in you city more troops you get, like provinces in risk and you have a dungeon master of sorts who can drop down armies that will attack you also you have to beware other players will attack you too!!!
haha yeah it’s indeed really interesting to stumble trough the tabletop game section on Kickstarter recently. but be aware that these heavy over-funded projects are very professional and well-organized. …and they usually have tons of high detailed mini’s involved where all the geeks go insane with pledging
@SteveAdamo@voxel_pirate in the end…yeah KS might be the way to go when we are ready for it. but there is a loooong way to go till this will happen as we want to be sure we’ll have a really fun, unique and solid board game & concept to present you.
@Newf haha yeah i did see @Froggy’s chess, awesome work! but he doesn’t need me for that, he can upload and sell it right away on a 3d printing platform where all of you can order a set! depending on the size it will be cost more than a few bucks but it might be worth to try it.
very nice summary of what you would like to see in our game! …and i can assure you there will be elements like you mentioned! the dungeon master was on the plan as well but for now we’ll go with different kind of fractions who will fight for glory & victory! haha
ok let’s move forward as i have so much to share… and for you purists out there: some voxels will show up eventually soon! ;D
3D PRINTING AND BOARD GAMES – A PERFECT MATCH?
While i was 3d printing my next batch of voxel things i also was doing my homework and looked a little deeper into the idea of using 3d prints for board- and tabletop games. There can be found a few projects already out there which are heading in this direction. If you’d like to get to know more head over to the link section and see what i did found on this topic so far.
So speaking of 3d printing in general i think we are in the “early adopters” phase right now and I’m confident that the market will bring us pretty soon very affordable printers for everybody that can be used at home. I’m not saying in the future every household will have a 3d printer but maybe every 10th or so will. But for now if you want to print something you usually do this trough a 3d-printing services. So i uploaded a few files to the Shapeways platform to see how much it would cost when a figure would be ordered from a 3d-printing services. Well… sadly it’s a pricy at the moment to print out a whole game with dozens of parts & figures for anyone who don’t own already a printer. Also the usual layer resolution of the hobby 3d printers out there is also not yet the perfect solution for high detailed figures in this scale. There are options to do very high detailed prints of with the Stereolithography (SL) technology but right now these are a lot more expensive than the common ABS or PLA printers. Although this is a viable option to do prototypes and make molds of the figures. The pieces can then be cast in resin or a similar material for a limited series.
Anyway i still pondering about doing a game that is 3d printable and as i just started with developing so i might be in time with the release when 3d printing is very affordable
Impressive list of links you have put together… it is obvious that you really are thinking about this seriously.
If quality is somehow limiting, the approach with voxel-figures should come handy, no? I would assume that a basic 3D-printer is capable of printing such models with a comparable low resolutions.
Can you share what a small figure printed by Shapeways would cost? I see a chess which they are selling for like € 120, that’s really quite a bit.
P.S. For the beginning, maybe you could also offer the models as simple 2D-pictures to download and print on a standard printer. You could offer a 3D-stand which people could print on a 3D-printer and add the model on top. Or e.g. for buildings the alternative to download kind of a construction paper, where you can cut out your models and fold them into a 3D-figure for the game.
well not exactly…it’s not very important how the model is builded up in its geometry. the only limiting factor is the printer resolution and overhanging parts (if the printer has no support material). when you have organic shaped models maybe you’ll see the layers slightly better. but i have to admit that i’m exactly at the point where i’d like to decide if voxels or “normal” models would fit better for our game. there are so many pros and cons already… be sure, i will get back to you guys with this question when i have revealed more.
i will show you a screen of some models and their costs later in a post. and there is always a little room for optimizing the models slightly so they’ll cost a few cents or even dollars less.
yes most of this is planned but we need to figure out how and in what order would be the best way to distribute the game to the community. construction paper sounds really fun but i think it would be too fiddly with all the tiny parts, figures and buildings we’ll need.
haha yeah i’ve almost backed them, looks great! but i have tons of unpainted minis slumbering somewhere here in this mess and sadly these would find their way to the pile as well…
ok so the next few post will be about the modular board idea and the tile design as it was in a very early stage. and yes a bunch of voxels will show up now for real!
FAST PROTOTYPING IN BOARD GAMES
I totally wanted to have something to play with today and I also wanted to figure out how quick i can do a functional prototype of a board game. So this was just a test run and there are no ideas & rules behind this prototype that would demand some specific pieces. I only figured out i will need a board and some kind of different pieces to represent figures or tokens. The board, the figures and some markers are made out of white acrylic glass and the cubes are made out of polyurethane block material. Back from the workshop i had a bag of tiny cubes with me to play with… goal accomplished! I started to arrange a first fictional game setting, took some notes and was ending in having some kind of dungeon crawler thingy that actually really can be played with a few silly rules…so it was great to see how fast an idea can assume a definite shape and be kind of playable.
I made an first attempt to design a modular board system for a board game. I used Qubicle Constructor to modeling a few different simple tiles and some environment like trees, monsters and treasure chests… as i’m pretty sure every good game needs treasures! I also experimented with a few sizes and shapes of the tiles but wanted to start with a small tile size in regard of reducing the price of the 3d printed pieces, so this is what i got so far.
Ok straight to the point: The first attempt of making tiles has failed, but hey that’s the reason why i love to do prototypes as fast as possible, to see what’s not working. I did use a CNC router to mill out of white acrylic glass a first set of tiles. The tiles have a relatively small dimension of only 16mm x 16mm. These are constructed as two layers, a 2 mm base part and a 1 mm thick upper part. I also made them with some sort of an overlapping part but i should have know that they wont hold together without an proper interlocking system. I also didn’t have arranged the laps in continuous order around the tile, so after adding the first pieces together it happens that you can’t place new tiles from every new border now…. not good.
Now of course we can’t just send you 500 single tile pieces and hope you will start playing the game right away. This means there has to be some larger chunks of tiles that will be produced as one piece. Speaking of production, i’m aware that this design of a board would imply that the tiles had to be plastic pieces done by injection molding and would be pretty expensive. As usual this is just an first approach and i’m already thinking of a budget friendlier version like using cardboard or even making the maps available as PDF template download for printing on a plain paper at home. But yeah in the end it’s maybe just me who loves the idea to play with a bunch of tiles and building my own maps in countless hours…i guess most folks just want to start playing the real game!
Made some progress on the acrylic sheet tiles. I’ve redesigned the interlocking part as well as going a little larger with the overall tile dimensions. The jigsaw pieces are now having a T-shape and the pieces holding together pretty snug. Still not the perfect solution for assembling the jigsaw parts are partially covered by the adjacent tile and so you can’t arrange them in any order.
@Pepe these are all amazing and I find myself at a loss for anything constructive as it seems as soon as I think of something I read the next line and you have provided the solution.
This was perhaps my concern with it, as fun as constructing maps will be, you could spend the evening simply constructing rather than playing the board game, so larger areas/ prefab structures would be a great addition …
As I said above I’m at a loss for anything constructive! So I’m just gonna sit back and enjoy your updates
that’s exactly my plan, glad you like it so far! …and if i need honest feedback or want your opinion on some stuff i will ask for it. also feel free to always throw in some random notes & thoughts if something pops into your mind while seeing my designs & prototypes.
Jesus @Pepe you are a machine! HIGHLY interested in this concept, I’m going to pour over the last set of posts and see if I can offer any meaningful feedback.
…obwohl wir als schweizer sind ja da nicht so versiert, ihr habt da doch das eine oder andere gebräu das mir noch besser schmeckt! 
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