Space Escape Board Game (moved)

Post date: Dec 5, 2017 7:26:10 PM

    This is our original sketch and description for the board game we wanted to make. We were motivated to do something that mixed candy-land and shoots and ladders. To shape our thinking we drew out a rough sketch of how the board would look, and wrote out the rules of exactly how our game would work.

    Mr D. encouraged us to look up laser cut board games for inspiration to help with our planning of what it might look like.

    These our some of the samples we found on the internet that further advanced our thinking. After looking at many different laser cut board games, we decided we wanted to combine the use of a track (like seen in the middle photo) with cards and symbol designs (as seen in the photo on the right).

    After we had a better handle on our vision for our board game, we decided we needed a theme to make it more unique. We thought a fun theme for this game would be outer space. With this in mind we combined our vision of the board with the theme of outer space, and these (photos above) are our sketches for the cards that go with the board game, and a more intricate sketch of the game itself.  

Now that we had a sketch of our board game we began prototyping the other elements to the game out of paper. Above is a paper prototype of the dye, and 3D prototypes of our space-themed game pieces that we hope to eventually make on the 3D printer.

Mr. D gave us the advice to start playing the game after we had made paper prototypes of everything. We tried the game along with Jack Totte to get outside feedback and see if the game was fun. We learned that we may have to get rid of/alter some of our card designs to make them work better with the game, but overall the game had a friendly yet competitive component to it was was really fun to play.

    Here is a photo of our first card prototypes, as we laser printed one of them on card-stock using the inkscape file we made. We were happy with the result, so we finished the rest of the inkscape file with the same format because we were happy with this design. With this card design we were content with, we decided to print a full deck of the cards on the same card-stock material to have our deck design all together. 

Here is our first final card prototype, as we tested one of them on the thin wood material we hope to print our final deck on. Although the card was not as bendy as our card stock deck was, we were happy with the resulting design and hope to continue soon with a full deck of thin wooden cards to go with our game. 

Since we had the cards for our game figured out with our process of prototyping, we began taking our actual board design to the next step of scanning. We took Mr. D's advice and redrew our board with the same cartoon-like design as in our original sketch. We outlined it neatly in sharpie in preparation for scanning the design onto the computer. Here is our final drawing outlined in sharpie compared to our original model for the design of the game. 

We finally began the printing process for our board game, as we finished the file that we would use by scanning our drawing onto the computer with our title and and etching pattern. Mr D. told us that we may want to consider panting the wood material so our etching would show up more clearly than on just regular wood. We tried this with a scrap piece of red painted wood, and liked the way our design and font showed up. With this information we now had our perfected file for printing with the right sizing and design, and now knew the correct material that we would use to print on. 

With the final file at hand, and a certain material left in mind, we began the process of making our final board to print on. We panted a think wooden slab all black, and spray painted it with gold, silver, purple, and blue to give our piece a cool galaxy effect. Here (photo on the right) is our final canvas for printing.

When we first printed the board on our spray painted wood, we noticed that the lines and shapes of our design weren't as defined as we wanted them to be because of how think the paint was on the wood. At first we didn't know how to overcome this, because the parts of the board looked very burnt. We assumed we just spray painted and painted the board enough that it was too thick of a layer for the printer to print the lines as defined as we thought they would be. Mr. D suggested from here that when the board was done printing, we should attempt to lay out paint on it and then wipe it off; a process that would cause paint to stick in the line and creases. We decided to go forth with this idea, to make our design pop on the board more. 

After we printed our board completely, we began going over it with white paint as Mr. D suggested to make the lines and designs more defined and pop out more. We did this a few times in different areas, as sometimes when we would wipe excess paint off it would scratch paint out of the lines as well. After a few layers of this process, we were pleased with the result and felt our board looked much better with the lines be more defined in white. 

Here is the final product as far as our actual board, after going over the board using the paint process a few more times and filling in the card tiles with a paint brush. This process with the white paint was one of the hardest parts of making the board, because when we wiped off the excess paint it gave the rest of our board sort of a clouded effect. To work through this we wiped off as much as we could and went over with as many layers of paint until the board was how we wanted. Overall, we thought the product was much better than the original etched board, as we loved the look of white on black and the lines being much more defined.

Once we finished perfecting our board, we printed out our final wood cards using the same format and thickness of wood from our wooden card prototype from before. We were happy with the design of our final result, as the cards looked great with the design of the board.

  (drawing for characters and stands)                  (inkscape file of characters after scanning)            (inkscape file of stands)

Now that we had the final board and cards, Mr. D suggested that we print our small characters in wood, and maybe make stands for them to be used on the board. After referring to our original drawing, we decided to go with the four more cartoon-like designs to use as our four characters for the game. These are our original drawings and sketches for the character designs and the designs for the way the stands would work (left picture). We scanned the characters into inkscape and made an inkscape file for the pieces for the stands. A challenging part of this process was measuring everything correctly so that the stands would appropriately hold up each character according to it's size but eventually we scaled it so that the stands were about an inch wider than the pieces, and so that the circular pieces to hold them up onto the stands were a little bit shorter than the width of the stands.

We etched and cut out the characters using the laser printer, as well as all the measured components for the stands. We glued the stands together making sure they fit each character piece perfectly, and when put together had out final characters for the board. Although some of the measurements and exact gluing process was tricky, we were extremely pleased with the result of our characters and how they fit the theme of Space Escape.

To finish off every physical component of our board, we used a 1 inch by 1 inch block of wood as our canvas for etching the dots to make a dye. We used the center engraving setting on the laser cutter and reconfigured the dots for each side in order to print all the numbers on six sides.

Here is our final project fully completed, including the board, the dye, and our laser cut cards. We got much more than we expected out of the printed board, and we loved the look of the white paint in the indents and the black shiny look throughout the background. The cards, characters, and dye all looked good with the wooden appearance and we were happy all our designs on them looked very clean and sharp as they were similar to how we envisioned them. Although we did not use the 3D printer for our board game pieces, we were very pleased with our stand-up character wooden design. Looking at all the components of our project together, we definitely exceeded our original expectations with a professional and creative end product.