G.A.M.E. M.A.K.E.R.

[Channelknight Fadran]

Hi there.

Uhh...

If you're here because of the stup, then you probably already know about this. If you're here because you found it randomly, then lemme explain.

I decided yesterday that I wanted to make a board game. Some buddies of mine (namely @Knight of Iron and @Butt Ad Venture) decided that they were interested, so we started conceptualizing and came up with some ideas. Here's what we got so far:

• We want it to be a fantasty RPBG, with lots of realms and magic and monsters and all that good stuff
• You'll have a character with which you'll go on quests to find treasure, items, and unlock new abilities
• Elephants
• Here's the doc

I'm really bad at explaining things so here's the discord for more information.

[Knight of Iron]

If this gets made we’re gonna need ideas, art, 3D models, etc. There are many ways one can contribute.

[Chinkoln]

I looked at it, and I’m confused

[Mat]

I’ll probably join soon, give me a bit  

[The Unknown Ajah]

I could do some stuff, but I'd probably do best at lore and concept drawing. And attacks, both magical and not. I'd be just about useless for balancing though.

[Chasmgoat]

I can help with a bunch, I would imagine

[Frustration]

Ah yes, a place for the ideas I no longer need.

[Channelknight Fadran]

Hooray! Humans!

[Experience]

I want to help, though I wonder if it's just going to end up like our last attempt at a board game. :P. I can't use discord sadly, but I might contribute ideas on the doc sometimes.

[The Unknown Ajah]

36 minutes ago, Experience said:

I want to help, though I wonder if it's just going to end up like our last attempt at a board game. :P. I can't use discord sadly, but I might contribute ideas on the doc sometimes.

This has kinda died, but I'm trying to get it back up and running. 

[Experience]

Do you guys literally want a 3d board? Cause I could possibly make one...

Edited August 24, 2021 by Experience
i litterallly cant spell literally

[The Unknown Ajah]

11 minutes ago, Experience said:

Do you guys literally want a 3d board? Cause I could possibly make one...

That got lost somewhere in the making process. I can edit in a summary in a second. 

We did a lot of races and roles, then we moved on to adding quests in challenges. We kinda stalled on what in the world the board is and on turn by turn gameplay.

Edited August 24, 2021 by The Unknown Order

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine]

@Channelknight Fadran, @Knight of Iron and @Butt Ad Venture.

The game doc is hilarious, and I think this is a really cool idea, here are some ideas about how you could make the gameboard.

Have any if you ever seen the 3M bookshelf series game Feudal? You might have come across it in a thrift store, the game itself was kinda garbage, but the gameboard and the pieces were amazing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudal_(game)

Basically it was a pegboard with terrain drawn on it, and the playing pieces were little sculpted figurines that had pegs on the bottom that fit into the holes on the board.

It was pretty sweet, but I think you can take this basic idea and make it loads better.

Using a modular hexagonal gameboard, you could have quests cards (with the world map, quest objectives, event types etc) attached to the back of the board, and have a base that custom terrain cells can snap into.

This would be modular and could expand, and the quest map would show you how to setup the board.

Here are some sample terrain building pieces.

Each is a hexagonal cell or group of hexagonal cells that would snap onto the game board, and would have small peg holes, like the Feudal gameboard, that the figurines for player characters and monsters could be snapped into.

And this is the part that would be really cool, the small but sculpted figurines could be scaled somewhat proportionally.

Not to toot my own horn, but I am a very accomplished technical illustrator, if someone has access to a cad program I could design and create Adobe illustrator files for the orthographics for the base board, and a blank terrain piece with the peg holes that could be turned into 3D printable pieces.

Also, I could design the standard base for the custom figures too. I would help with the concept art that some other talented sharder could turn into 3D figurine models to attach to the peg base.

The thing that is pretty sick about this idea is that it's all modular and expandable. There could be a starter set that has a few quests and mostly base terrain pieces, and you could have expansions that have more custom terrain, buildings, etc. The floating island piece could have extended clear acrylic pegs so that it could actually look like it's floating over the gameboard.

Something else that would be very cool, would be to make the base components available on thingverse so that players could create custom terrain, figurines, etc.

Players could create and share custom figurines/terrain/campaign cards, I think this could be amazing.

I've got regular work that I need to do, but I think this is a super cool idea and I would love to help out.

I've got a buddy that has a 3D printer, so if we get a CAD person we could start prototyping.

[Channelknight Fadran]

First of all: Heya, Grapevine! It's been a minute!

Second of all: Wowza. That's cool. I say we go with it!

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine]

8 hours ago, Channelknight Fadran said:

First of all: Heya, Grapevine! It's been a minute!

Second of all: Wowza. That's cool. I say we go with it!

As a teenage Christian Slater would say imitating a 45 year old Jack Nicholson, Greetings and Salutations.

I was thinking about this some more, I could do some paper prototyping of the game board design and get the dimensions right before we figure our how to kick it out to a 3D printer. This is a pretty sweet idea, so I'll find the time sometime within the next week to do it, and will post some pics of the prototypes.

Edited August 25, 2021 by Hoiditthroughthegrapevine
Typos, always typos

[Channelknight Fadran]

Just now, Hoiditthroughthegrapevine said:

As a teenage Christian Slater would say imitating a 45 year old Jack Nicholson, Greetings and Salutations.

I was thinking about this dome more, I could do some paper prototyping of the game board design and get the dimensions right before we figure our how to kick it out to a 3D printer. This is a pretty sweet idea, so I'll find the time sometime within the next week yo do it, and will post some pics of the protypes.

0_0

...

Wow. Okay.

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine]

Ok, so I ended working on this a bit, this is a pretty compelling project.

I designed the base layout of the expandable hexagonal game board in a vector draw program, figured out what size the base for the figurines should be (to allow multiple figurines on the same tile) and mocked up a couple simple terrain tiles. The cool thing about a hexagonal grid is that there are six possible rotations for each placeable terrain tile, making it easy to create more freeform forms using just a couple standard tiles. The Board Layout is spoilered below for size (it's vertically long). Each of the hexagonal tiles is 1 inch wide and about .8625 inches tall. Also, the standard base for the figurine peg is .25 inches in diameter, and the peg holes are .05 inches in diameter. I'm not as well versed in 3D printing to know if there would be any tolerance issues with those sizes, but I think it's a pretty decent size.

Spoiler

I also was thinking more about the base game board, instead of having a custom base that pieces snap onto, it makes more sense to use the existing peg holes or the shape of the terrain pieces themselves. That way with the base gameboard, you essentially have a basic map already set up, and you are just adding on top of that. I think the peg style would be best, but I do worry about the little pegs snapping off in the peg holes. Here's an axonometric diagram of the two different styles of terrain tiles. The peg style ones would still probably be the way to go, because it would look more seamless, but having interlocking stackable tiles would be nigh unbreakable.

Also, for prototyping, it would pretty easy to make token style figurines, where you have a standard base that can hold a bit of double side printed stiff paper. The fully sculpted figurines would definitely be cooler, but these are much easier to prototype.

Edited August 25, 2021 by Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

[Experience]

20 hours ago, Hoiditthroughthegrapevine said:

I would help with the concept art that some other talented sharder could turn into 3D figurine models to attach to the peg base.

I'm not very good at characters, so I wouldn't likely be able to help with that. I think I could help with the terrain pieces. I'll start to mess around with the different terrain parts. 

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine]

28 minutes ago, Experience said:

I'm not very good at characters, so I wouldn't likely be able to help with that. I think I could help with the terrain pieces. I'll start to mess around with the different terrain parts. 

Sweet! I can post a link to an AI, DWG, or SVG file of a terrain tile. If any of those would be useful just let me know.

Another thing that would be kind of cool would be to have some terrain tiles dip on some of the sides, so so could create bluffs, buttes, and other topographic features. If the description isn't clear (seems a bit mucked) I can post some sketches of what I'm talking about.

[Experience]

The SVG one would be nice! 

Ya, that could be cool, and could add something where some characters can fly over but others need to climb from that direction so it's slower. Or something like that.

[Channelknight Fadran]

YES TO ALL OF THESE THINGS WHAT THE SCUD GRAPEVINE'S BEIN' THE MVP

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine]

@Experience here's the SVG file:

GM_TerrainTiles_ForSVG_Prototype.svg

Here's a JPG preview of what it looks like, it's just the top plan view of the terrain tile and peg holes, but I also included a 4x4 tile and an 8x8 tile of it.

Spoiler

Have fun prototyping it and printing it out! Definitely post pictures here!
Also, if you could post the 3d printable files too, that would be slick, I could test print them out at my buddy's place.

The terrain tile is pretty basic, and I don't know what your setup is for generating 3D printable pieces, but if you want I could get some otrhographics (Front, Side, Top views) of the token style figurine too if that would help you print it.That way we could test out the pieces in the board.

I have some ideas about how to create a pretty seamless interlocking mechanism for connecting multiple tiled boards, but I have some other stuff to do over the next couple of days, so I'll post some sketches sometime next week.

[Frustration]

Might I take charge of multiversal organisation?

@Channelknight Fadran

Edited August 30, 2021 by Frustration

[Experience]

@Hoiditthroughthegrapevine

I haven't really done much work with 3d printing before, so this'll be a fun project to learn how to do that. 

For the tiles, do we want to go with the peg or the stacking? I'm guessing peg so I'll start with that.

Also, for river tiles I'm not sure if it would be better to indent the river into the tile a bit or to just have it on the surface? I'm going to play around with both to see if one looks a lot better than the other. 

Also, what's the point of the larger holes on the corner and in the center of each tile?

Edited August 26, 2021 by Experience
Added another question

[+Hoiditthroughthegrapevine]

11 hours ago, Experience said:

I haven't really done much work with 3d printing before, so this'll be a fun project to learn how to do that. 

For the tiles, do we want to go with the peg or the stacking? I'm guessing peg so I'll start with that.

Also, for river tiles I'm not sure if it would be better to indent the river into the tile a bit or to just have it on the surface? I'm going to play around with both to see if one looks a lot better than the other.

Sounds great, can't wait to see what you come up with!

11 hours ago, Experience said:

Also, what's the point of the larger holes on the corner and in the center of each tile?

The big circles are just markers for the preferred place to put pegs on the bottom of the the terrain tiles (small number of pegs but should make the join snug). But those are totally just suggested join peg spots, that's the beauty of prototyping, you get to figure out what works the best.

I was thinking about how we could join the tile boards, and I think this would be a pretty slick way to do it, use tabs and slots. Here's a sketch of a 2x2 tile board:

Here's a more diagramitic view of a 4x4 tile board.

With the tabs and slots arranged like this it should be easy to expand the board with additional tile boards.

The tabs basically have little hooks on their ends that would be the bits that secure the joined boards together.

I went through a couple iterations of design sketches, and this was the best solution I came up with.

I'm going to be camping this weekend, but if you need any orthographics with specific measurements for the pieces, let me know and I can probably get those yo you by midweek.

Cheers and happy prototyping!