Facility: 3D Preview

The word is out. A very valuable piece of intelligence leaked on the net about something some people would pay a really high price for. The location they gave was a secret underground facility on this lonely rock. You hop into action and make your way to the world. A long flight due to its remote location and slow currents leading there, but the goal should more than compensate for your trouble. You know this information leaked to everyone so you will not be the only mercenary on the job.

Let’s see how well you fare in the facility.

Just a little mock-up of a game in progress using Tinkercad. Someone had a question of scale of the tiles a while back, and this shows it. The miniatures are 28mm tall. My hope is this conveys a sense of infiltrating an underground installation. I have been working on the rulebook and that always helps put thinks into perspective. What works and what doesn't.

Above is one of the images I will use in the rulebook for attacks. The character (left) rolled 3 dice in attacking the enemy (right) who rolled 5 dice in his defense. Since with attacks only the target symbol counts for hits, the attacker won the roll, and deals 1 damage (3-2=1).

Speaking of which, here are a couple new figures Jarom drew and I tried making models of.

I started experimenting with texturing the bases or at least giving them a few features. These are enemy figures. Scientists, security, and staff you encounter in the Facility.

Facility: WIP Hezak Minis

I thought I'd do a quick post showing some WIPs of my Hezak minis for the Facility boardgame. The concept art was featured here. They are mostly done, I will just need to test print them when I get the printer and modify them accordingly. Designing things for 3D printing can be challenging. You can't have too much of an overhang is a big thing. Which is why on the lower mini I have his smaller right arm connecting to form a bridge to his larger right arm.

Facility: Game Pieces and Rules Overview

The work on Facility - A Wartech Boardgame is coming along. The last post about it showcased the tile and door pieces. The game is designed to be a modular boardgame simulating mercenaries or agents inside an underground facility or space station, working against each other for the same goal, whether it is getting a valuable objective, person, or just looting as much valuable stuff as possible.

My goal is to introduce RPG elements into the game, particularly character creation. You don't choose from a set of pregenerated characters, but you may build your own. The character creation process is as simple as distributing 9 points among 3 stats however you like, choosing a perk, buying a couple items/tech, and that's it. Then your characters can level up with a simple XP system. Whenever they gain a level, you get to choose an additional perk.

The above are experimental trackers for HP and XP. Everyone in the game (player or enemy mobs) have 5 hit points, unless they have the Toughness perk, in which they have 6. The hexagons are simply used to count down your health. The sides have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and T. Naturally you generally start at 5, unless you have Toughness, then you start at T. The black chevrons are designed to be sliders on the side of your character card, used for tracking experience and leveling. Again, all the pieces in this game are 3D printed, except the manuals, character cards, and mob cards.

Motion Trackers. Blips. You get the idea.

Basic gameplay is each turn you have 2 actions. Activate your character, and activate an enemy piece that is not in the same tile as your character. This way each player is acting their own, as well as the enemies on the board. The upper tokens are called 'blip' tokens. They are placed randomly throughout the Facility before the game begins, and can be moved as part of your 'activate enemy' action. Each token has a number underneath. When a character occupies the same room as a blip token, the token is flipped over and the number is referenced to a chart to find out which enemy mob counter it is replaced with. This represents players not knowing what is coming for them until they get to the same room. They can still try to hunt/avoid them because they have motion trackers, hence the blip.

The other tokens on the bottom are 'objective' tokens. They too are placed randomly but do not move. They also have numbers underneath. In most scenarios only 1 of those represent the actual mission objective, and the rest are red herrings.

The game uses unique printed dice. Each has two 'Miss' sides which look like )(, three 'Hit' sides which look like cross-hairs, and 1 'Crit' side, which looks like an explosion. Basic combat is handled by the attacker rolling an amount of dice equal to his appropriate attack stat, and the defender rolling an amount of dice equal to his appropriate defense stat, and the difference in Hits of the attacker over the defender is how much damage is dealt. Crits have special effects depending on the situation. This is pretty much the exact same basic combat system I have for Angry Miniatures, but without using Poker Dice.

There are a lot more special actions and fun rules I have planned, but that give you an idea of the game. Next time I will show off a few of the character pieces I've designed.

Jarom's Art Incomming

Jarom is off to college, and so like during his mission, he is sending me his art. I thought I would showcase some of my favorites today.

The Facility project pretty much needs its miniatures at this point. Again, Facility is a Wartech boardgame where everything is 3D printed. So I listed to him what all miniatures I need, and he provides me with the concept art for them. I will in turn try to create them in Tinkercad. These are meant to be low detailed and blocky, using a lot of basic shapes. That is because the 3D printer can only do so much resolution. They are also in poses that prevent any overhangs because of the nature of the printing. These are 2 Hezak minis. Can't wait to get started on them.

 Here are a few pieces he sent me for Cognitive Flux. You can tell he has a lot of fun experimenting with creating the steampunk look and feel for things.

This last one is for an adventure idea he had for Cognitive Flux. Basically an ancient giant harvesting vehicle awakens and becomes a danger to surrounding settlements.

Facility: Room Tiles

In one of my last Wednesday posts I talked of making games with 3D printers, and I announced my project; Facility - A Wartech boardgame. That was also when I talked of a great in-browser 3D program called Tinkercad. I've been working on it a lot, and have made some pretty cool stuff. These are all things planned for Facility. The sad thing is I can't see how they will turn out until I get the actual printer. But at least I'm getting some practice in.

These are the hallway tiles. 2 of this file is to be printed off. All pieces follow the same basic dimensions, which will be true for all other tiles. This is so any configuration will follow a grid-like pattern, to prevent awkward meetups and connections.

Rooma A. I had fun coming up with the different style of rooms you would find in a spaceship or an undergound facility. Even though all the rooms are treated the same, I still wanted all players to feel as though they are exploring an actual functioning facility, and not just exploring featureless rooms for objectives.

Rooms B. So this and the image above comprises the rooms you build with. See if you can guess what some of the rooms actually are.

Door pieces. I definitely had fun designing all sorts of different scifi doors for this game. When setting up the board, you also place door, and they are designed to slide in between the walls of 2 interconnecting tiles. Doors can halt or impede the progress of your opponent, and just add another piece to the visual feel of the game.

The Beauty of 3D Printing

Every once in a while I begin to forget why I'm saving up my precious moneys for a 3D printer, and not spending it all on awesome gaming stuff. Then whenever that happens, I stumble into something that reminds me why I'm doing it. I found this on Thingiverse. It's no secret that home 3D printer resolution can leave you wanting, but this guy's minis look great. Even with the limited resolution, you definitely recognize what is what. The idea is to keep the minis very simple and detail free. Rely on bigger things to show it off, like capes, poses, and big weapons.

Check out other stuff by him. Like Pocket Tactics. Being able to print off these alone and how many you want, makes the Makerbot worth the wait.

One of my biggest obstacles with 3D printing though would be the CAD part. I have little experience with 3D design programs and any I experiment with can be a huge headache. Like using photoshop for the first time with no instructions. So many tools and can be confusing.

And then I found Tinkercad. An amazing website which uses a light but effective browser based design program. All your files are stored online, and no download necessary to run. It's all handled within the browser. Within minutes of doing some of their simple tutorials, I became really good at it, and have already began making things. It is awesome.

So with a new found excitement in 3D printing, and a great design program to cut my teeth on, I am planning my next project. A board game where everything is printed.

Over the weekend I went on a long 4 day trip to attend my wife's graduation from her masters program (Gratz again, Hunny!) and the whole time I thought about this and wrote up several pages on it. So part of the official announcement, here is a scan directly from my notebook.

Facility will be a scifi board game set in our Wartech universe. It will give you a small primer to the setting and utilize a variation of my tested rules from my other rules-lite miniatures game, Angry Miniatures.

This will give me plenty of practice in CAD so when I finally get my Makerbot (I am now at $700!) I will be able to utilize it right away.