Nay Saga Devlog 10: 3D Printing & TheGameCrafter Prints

So I was out of town for awhile leading up to this CUPdate, so it’s a bit of a smaller post, but I did some 3D printing before I left, so that’s mostly what I’ll be talking about here. I also ordered the first copy of most assets from TheGameCrafter and that came in the mail!

While I was coming up with extra parts, I decided to find some card case models on Thingaverse and do some 3D prints to figure out if I could use any of those for my game. The first one came out  too small since I resized it to fit in my printer so it wasn’t big enough to hold cards. But then I continued to print a bunch more each day and found a couple that are pretty good for what I want.

Then I decided to make a 3D model of The Gek so I could use it as a printable piece for indicating who the current starting player is. I sculpted this in Blender.

I took the model into Flashprint MP to prepare it for printing.

Then I printed it out! I tried a bigger size and used some paint markers to test how they worked on the 3D prints. It was pretty good but I didn’t have a purple one so I had to paint The Gek blue instead. Then I printed a couple of smaller versions too that are closer  to the size that I think I want it to be. I may end up using acrylic paints for the final version.

So I ordered one of each game part on TheGameCrafter and after about 2.5 weeks, it shipped to my location! It was really exciting to open the package up and see my box shrink-wrapped and a physical game. I was happy with how it all came out! I think my main change for the box itself is that I may update where the gloss is and reserve it for only the characters.

I opened it up and the numbered tiles and score tokens all printed out good as well! I may want to work on the designs a bit to re-center and have less border-like elements to account for the drift of them being slightly off-centered, but otherwise very minor updates would be made.

The score board came out well and I tested out the dry erase markers with it. I was happy to find out that any dry erase markers work so I can more easily replace and mix and match colors.

And then I looked through the cards! I printed a few variations on colors I wasn’t 100% certain on, and I’m really happy that all of them are readable on the final cards so I’m able to pick the ones I like most instead of accommodating for ones that might be more readable. The quality on these cards is a lot higher than I was used to from my prototype cards so I’m really happy with those as well.

So I picked the best of each type and I decided which ones I’m going with for my final ones. I’m happy that none of them look too similar to each other and they’re all readable.

And it was cool seeing the card backs finally on all of them. I’m still thinking about maybe updating that drawing of The Gek but I’m not 100% sure yet.

Then I tested out using dry erase markers for the guessing card. The black ended up being unreadable, so I knew not to use that for the final.

I tried red and that one works well. I’m probably going with the dark backgrounds since that’s easier to fill in and read.

Then I laid out some cards and put tokens on top to simulate what it would look like in the game and I’m happy with how they came out!

I also continued to draw more characters to add to the ones available in the game! This has been an on-going background task I’m doing when I’m not currently working on the game and just need something easy to do on nights after work.

So I’m getting very close to the end of this project. Just some tweaks on the assets, the rulebook, and then final prints!

Nay Saga Devlog 9: Game Parts & Live Playtesting

So I’m finally closing in on the final designs and some of the assets outside of the cards. While I know I said I “finalized” the card design last time, I did end up revisiting it and I’ll show the actual (hopefully) final design in this post!

I started to think about some of the other assets like score cards for the rounds, point tiles, guessing card, etc. So I made digital sketch versions of the ones I originally concepted in my sketchbook. I downloaded some of the templates from TheGameCrafter as a starting point and then designed ideas based on some of my older sketches to start to plan those.

I printed out my super rough versions just to test for scale. They all came out pretty accurate, but I do know that I want to make the lines a little thinner (or stylized) when I start to finalize the score card, because they look a little thick right now.

I started to think about the logo so I digitized a few of my concepts to start getting some colors in there. At first I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go with a red or blue color scheme, but I knew thinking one of those was likely. Red was feeling more right because of Mr Dude, but I was so used to the blue that I’ve been concepting with, so it was hard to decide. I ended up going with red in the end though. I’ve been drawing inspiration from Yoshitaka Amano logos like Romancing Saga and Final Fantasy for some of the last few designs. It feels a little busy right now but that’s kind of the direction I’m thinking about so it’s more integrated.

I decided to concept some ideas for the box art, taking a lot of inspiration from board game boxes that I enjoy. I came up with some ideas for the front and back. I want it to be very centered around Mr Dude and all of the characters fighting against CourtNay and Jesper.

I threw together a quick back for the card based on one of the logo ideas I had. The more I concept, the more I’m mixing the red, blue, and purple color schemes. So it can be Mr Dude and The Nays color schemes.

Then I started to come up with some “final” images for the extra pieces. I’m still not 100% sure if they’re final, but I’m making progress! I made the score board next. I started with flat colors then added textures to them to make them stand out more.

Then I test printed them to see how they would look on paper! I was pretty happy with how most of these came out. 

I still wanted to do a few more designs for the card backs. So I threw some textures on it and played around with some filters to make some new concepts. I was leaning more towards the top-right and top middle designs below. I ended up going with the top-right because it felt most right to me.

Then I came up with some ideas for the type advantages card layout. At first I thought about swapping the red and green arrows. These didn’t end up as the final designs but were the first ones.

Then I started to finalize the design for the guessing card. I fit all of the traits on there, but I still wasn’t 100% sold on the background colors.

I printed all of those new cards out to see how they’d look printed! This photo is from before I made the final calls on some of them, but it was what helped me get to the final decision on them.

Then my friends Jinny, Hillary, and Laura helped me beta test my game! They all had fun playing it and it was really valuable to finally test with real people. It boosted my mood a lot to know that they were genuinely having fun playing it and didn’t have a lot of big notes to change from it.

So I made some slight tweaks to the card designs based on feedback and playing the game. I mainly wanted to make the type strengths pop out more so it’s easier to view at a glance, since that was the biggest struggle that we all agreed on while we were. Jinny helped me figure out the final colors (and it took about 20 slight iterations after the last time to get to final designs). I’m finally happy with these and can hopefully call them final!

I also updated the type advantages chart card since I had a misprint with some of the arrow directions. I decided to simplify it a bit so you can tell more which type is specifically strong against the other instead of trying to account for both. I updated the guessing card to add the types in as well.

Then I finally started to prep my cards for printing on TheGameCrafter and exported the files I needed. I’m getting close to the first official prints!

Then I realized for the font I’m using, it was missing some special characters, so I went ahead and edited the font in FontForge to add some of those. It was a challenge for me since I don’t have a lot of experience with vectors and using the pen tool. Some of them I might have to come back to or do slight edits on to manually draw over names though to fix them up in the end.

Then I started on the rules for the game. I just typed this all out in a Google Doc and decided that the formatting would come later. I just wanted to get all of the text down on paper first.

Then I finally finished my logo! I got some feedback last time and so I made some tweaks and leaned in closer to my inspirations. I’m finally satisfied with how it looks.

I also started concepting the box design digitally. I started with a sketch and then cleaned up the drawings. I really liked how it came out! I added the logo and playing elements to it and the top of the box is officially complete.

I also worked on the back of the box to include more information. I still need to work on updating the contents to be accurate to the final count, but otherwise it’s done! There are a few parts I was waiting on the final card design for as well so it took me a bit to get here.

And then I also started to save out images for all of the other cards. There are going to be 700+ characters in this and I had all of the images collected, I just needed to save them out as transparent PNGs that are lined up and resized to fit the cards. So I did that in a night or two for the majority of the characters.

Then I saved out the first drafts of all ~700 cards using those images. Some of them were missing areas and I had to do some tweaks but I was able to see them all at a glance and know what’s next. It was really satisfying to see them all flood in within a matter of minutes! I love how much time nanDECK is saving me.

Then after triple-checking everything, I officially sent my designs off to print from TheGameCrafter! I’m printing just the first few pieces to make sure they print okay before printing the entire game. Someone on the staff helped me out since I was having a bug where it wasn’t allowing me to proof the files and then they also gave me some tips on removing borders that I forgot I kept in there (as I had been using them just for my prototyping). So it’s officially in!

By the next post (or the one after it), I’ll have the first batch of prints hopefully here with some ideas on anything needed to update for the final version. Hopefully not too many tweaks will come from that. But I’m printing a few versions of any of the cards I’m slightly worried about!