@Skull24 thanks for sharing the 3d-printer, there are more and more companies that are trying to sell “hobby printers” in this price range, looking forward to have my own at home soon… about your question: yes, this might be an option in the future, but we hope that in a first step the community shares their parts with others for free. we also will try to make available our 3d files for the core game for free.
@Newf yes for sure! this will be one of our goals, to build a game where you can collect your own fraction and print out most of the parts for the game.
@SteveAdamo@Geoffers747 well that’s a pretty good question! we are in the middle of revamping an important part of our game but i will try to explain where we are at moment: our board game is a strategic city building game where you will build your own town, city or epic capital (depends on how long you want to play the game). collecting resources and gold trough buildings, mines and dices each round to gain more possibilities will be crucial. you will be able to trade these resources with your opponents or trough the market, expand your city and recruit more troops and support cards (spells, weapons, gears & items). with these troops you will fight under the leadership of one of your heroes on the fields and battle in epic card fights with a unique battle system against other players. you even will be able to siege opponents cities and jamming their economy. you can win the game with your brutal military force, but also with your excellence in having the best economy.
I always like to have an overall and zoomed out view when working on new projects as i usually lost myself pretty fast working on small details. I already have a first general idea in my head how a complete game universe could work. We’ll try to create a core game that grows with customized community driven content by using 3d printing services and custom card printing services for most of the game parts. So i tried to visualize this (slightly confusing) “web platform and business diagram” to see how large the scale could be if this idea goes really big… and no worries, we will start small but it’s always nice to have a vision of the “end game”!
If there are modifiable map parts for our game there has to be a solution to create a digital blueprints and an option to share these map designs with others. This might be a crucial part of the overall idea to have a library with a lot of user generated and play tested maps. Like i mentioned i’ve had a vague idea in my head over the last few days about this so i tried today to visualize how such an map editor could could look and work. The idea is to work towards a free, easy accessible, web based editor solution. Kind of a drag-and-drop design program that can handle different board pieces that can be then ordered from us directly or the needed files for the map can be downloaded for 3d printing.
This mockup is not working right now as i’m not the kind of guy who can code such stuff, but i think it should be possible to find someone who can write a nice and neat app out of content like this. Let me know if you’re the one that i’m looking for… :]
An app for the game make sense in multiple ways not only as editor. We think it definitively should be an app that supports the game and is not the game itself. I will try to write more about this when i’m working on the app idea.
Depending on the size of individual tiles and the extent of the library…
Modular D&D Maps, anyone? Seriously, if each square is large enough to fit one of the 4E figures on it, it’d be an excellent addition to a campaign.
Pepe, if you decide to go the kickstarter route when you’re eventually ready to market this stuff, you could definitely appeal to some of the Tabletop folks by offering a landscape bundle (sans the rest of the board game), with a small grouping of just tiles and trees and such.
If you were looking for other things an app could add, it could have a little built in wiki for equipment/weapons/items/monsters etc. so you could find them easily and without requiring an internet connection.
i was absorbed by work and a few other more pleasant things like my baby daughter over the last few weeks. first of all thanks for the great ideas and feedback so far. I’m still working almost every free minute on our board game concept and we’re making great progress with the the mechanics, cards and lately with the factions/figures. but sadly i haven’t had much time to update the blog and this thread here. so i’ll try to give you folks at least an insight of the the stuff i’m working on that is somehow Stonehearth releated: voxel stuff!
we were spending a lot of time to redefining the core game over the last few weeks and changed whole parts of the gameplay but finally a few corner stones are pretty well developed (others are not…). we’re already having a fully working card battle system that we’re trying to make even more fun and more streamlined.
artwork wise we recently decided to go down the voxel/pixel route because we came to the conclusion that it is the only way we can create more or less good looking artwork for all the game parts by our own without hiring an artist to render a lot of artwork. and the second even more important reason was that we want to create a game where you, yes you as player, can bring in your own ideas into the game universe and create fantastic new content or even whole new tribes/factions on your own and playing with it on the board. the basic idea is pretty similar to modding SH but this time your content will be transformed from digital to real life.
i posted these pictures already over at the “Steffers Geodamo Siphoning Center For Painting And Stuff” thread a while ago and they’ll give you an good idea in what direction the artwork will go… YAY for pixel art! (all done in Qubicle)
a rendering of an equipment card: The Legendary Ice Greatsword!
a few element faction icons (life, fire, water, stone)
some frame work, templates and icons done with Qubicle Constructor
…and here’s a generic troop card mockup. QC, MAX & PS, …still WIP
now the real fancy new stuff is still slumbering in my archives and needs yet to be shared …hopefully i’ll find time tonight to upload some of these pictures, stay tuned!
Outstanding work! The finished game just has to become a smashing success!
I saw a typo in the description “acient” should be “ancient”.
But rather than just fixing that word I’ll suggest a completely alternative version:
“High up in the Mountains of Rathe, these two stubborn guards are watching every move of the enemy and prepare the best defense for their ancient King Quorlock.”
@PDanford awesome, thanks a bunch for the great alternative flavor text! this is appreciated as i’m not native speaking this strange language called English and i’m making tons of mistakes when writing… if you have time and be in a mood to write more flavor text for my cards or even a rich background story for our factions i def would hire you! not that i can pay you a fortune but maybe you’ll trade your services for goods…?
okay, well as mentioned i’m working on my board game like a maniac and i have tons of work in progress to share but i think the most interesting part right now for you guys are the figures. allrighty, let’s see if i can put together a short overview of the workflow from digital to physical, so you can see how you will be able to make the tabletop/board game figures for our game.
well as in every good game we have to start modelling our character in Qubicle Constuctor!
now sadly QC can’t export to the STL (STereoLithography) format for printing. hopefully @Tim will implement this into Vers. 2.0. so we need to write an OBJ solid of our little chap and go trough a software that can write STL’s. i’ve used Autodesk 3DS MAX for this but Blender or similar software will work as well. The good thing of going through a rendering program is, that you now can also do a quick rendering of the character as a little goodie.
the STL we have to feed into the 3d printer software and check it for errors. every 3d printer has it’s own stl viewer and slicer but here you can see how mine did calculate the printing layers and the surrounding support material that stabilizes the print and allows us to print overhanging parts.
the scale of this print is 1.5. so 1 voxel edge is in reality 1.5mm. the skeleton is in this scale 45mm high (1 3/4 inch). after 1 1/2 hours of printing time we get a ABS model that is wrapped in support material. we can remove most of the support material with tools and then putting the model into a lye that is washing out the remaining stuff until it’s clean.
as you see here there is another thing that is quite simple with 3d-printing: scaling upwards/ downwards your model to the size you’ll need it. the tiny model on the left is 1:1 (1 voxel = 1mm), middle is 1:1.5 (1 voxel = 1.5mm) and the largest one is 1:2 (1 voxel = 2mm). the size in the middle we will use for our game as it’s perfect for our board and still looks ok if you print your figures with a low quality printer.
i’ve used a base coat and painted the model with acrylic colors afterwards. shading with washes and painting the edges with more brighter colors is the key here. first i found i quite difficult to paint a model that only consists out of tiny cubes but after a while i really had a lot of fun painting these models. the final look is a bit grainy and you see the printing layers shine through but overall i’m pretty sure this will work!
ok some of you may say: “way to much effort for me!”, “i can’t paint” or “huh…what is this 3d-printing-stuff anyway?” so there is a simple solution for you: just order your figures through [Shapeways][1] or another 3d printing services in full color! check [this tumblr][2] to see some sweet 3d printed voxel figures in color. but our approach will be in a first release to appeal to the board/tabletop gamers that are willing to invest a little bit of time and passion into the game. and some of them may even have a printer at home. so our models will be optimized for this kind of printers, but more about this next time.
about your question: yes, this might be an option in the future, but we hope that in a first step the community shares their parts with others for free. we also will try to make available our 3d files for the core game for free.
