The Plot Unfolds

Amazingly, even over a year after my last post, this project has not yet died. In fact, I don't think any of my projects ever truly die; they just go into very deep hibernation.

I don't remember the events leading up to the discovery; but I found an image of another custom Settlers board, and in fact an Instructables Article on how it was made. This one was made from scrap plywood into an abstract, but very cool 3D board.



While I mulled over the possibilities of making a similar board, either out of plywood, or wood shapes from craft stores, my mind wandered over to another interest of mine, papercraft models, and a new direction for my custom 3D board appeared in my mind.

I will now develop my custom Settlers board and playing pieces as papercraft.

If well designed, and printed on suitably heavy cardstock, the hexes should stand up to reasonable abuse during play.

Weight of the pieces might be a minor issue; the hexes and game pieces could easily be knocked about or blown away. However, there are ways of dealing with that.

For example, suitably sized flat washers affixed in the hex bases can provide weight and stability. Strip magnets (like those used on the back of fridge magnets) could easily be used at the edges within the structure of the hexes to hold them together during play.

The game pieces can be weighted with small fishing sinkers or small nuts/washers and glue stuffed within each piece.

An advantage to the papercraft concept, apart from being unique, is that if a part is damaged; then replacement is relatively easy. Just print out a new copy and assemble.

The papercraft board and pieces is just concept at the moment; so I don't have any other goodies to share. But hopefully soon, I will have some conceptual models of the hexes built.

Developing Interest

So, with some small measure of work, I have managed to more or less get myself back to where I left after before my flash drive crash; and I even managed a little progress.

The hex tile number tokens, card backs, building cost card face, and resource cards faces are all rebuilt and waiting till I'm ready to print the cards.

The one and only element I did not rebuild was the soldier's face that I had started on. The reason I have not rebuilt the soldier's face is that it was far more detailed than necessary for the size the soldiers will end up on the cards; so I saw little point in going through all that work again for something that would not be very visible in the final product.

Instead, I chose to forge ahead with preparing the card faces for the development cards. All the development card faces, including the text, but excluding their illustrations, are done. I need only add their illustrations, and they'll be ready for printing. I've included the largest army and longest road cards among this development card set for purposes of getting them drawn up.

So now, what I expect to be the most difficult, longest, and most arduous task of all the card graphics work is now ahead of me; that being the illustrations for the development cards.

As I did before, I will likely begin with soliders. I've got at least three different soldiers I want to draw up; possibly a fourth, in fact. Is it more than necessary? Yes. But doing so will enrich the final product in the end, I think; so why not?

Drawn of the Dead

Believe it or not this project is still not dead; it just goes into frequent hibernation.

I pulled my graphics files off my flash drive onto my laptop's hard drive, making them more conveniently accessed. Consequently, I've gotten back into the swing of rebuilding the card graphics again.

It's slow going; there's a lot to rebuild. The last couple of evenings saw me make progress in the form of rebuilt Card Back designs, and reasonable progress on rebuilding the resource card faces. The resource icons are done; they were fully recovered, thankfully. But the actual resource card faces were not fully recovered; on a positive note though, there was one complete resource card face, and a partially complete resource card face recovered after the flash drive crash.

Last night, I prepared all five resource card faces for completion. The titles, shield colors, and main icons are in place; all that remains to complete them is to appropriately revise the building cost lists in the lower banners. Where the resource card faces are concerned though, that's actually the tough bit.

Hopefully I'll get the resource card faces rebuilt this weekend, ready to move onto something else soon afterwards. I know I still have to rebuild the Hex Tile Number Chits; those will be easy enough once I get to them.

Well, enough rambling from me for now; I ought to get back to work on it all.

The 7 Month Itch

I've been sitting idle on this project for a few months now; but the itch to get back onto it is setting in. I've got a significant desire to get back to work on this project. I haven't even rebuilt all the graphics that I lost when my previous flash/micro drive died on me; so I think that's the place to start. I'm also considering moving my project wiki to the new GRHG portal, if for no other reason than to just get a bit more content in that portal.

I'll post more when I actually get something significant done on the graphics rebuild work.

We Can Rebuild It; We Have The Technology

So, the long work to rebuild the collection of graphics I had previously created started tonight. Fortunately, thanks in part to this blog, I at least have most of the graphics I created in raster iamge format, that I can use as guides to recreate the images as vector graphics in inkscape.

I started simple by recreating the 'Iroquois Confederacy' border pattern that appears on the card backs, and on the Building Cost cards. It's a small start; but it's a start nonetheless.

Lost, But Not At Sea

In a most horrible twist of fate, this custom settlers project has suffered a serious setback; the flash drive on which all of the latest graphics files for the project were stored is pooched! Of course, being the bonehead I can sometimes be, I haven't backed up the drive's contents for over six months.

I'm lucky enough to have a much older version of the icons SVG file on my office computer; that file, at the least has the complete version of all the icons, and the resource card face design for at least one card. The card back designs, the Building Costs cards, the tile number chits, and my soldier graphics are all gone. I've lost a whole lot of work. Fortunately, I've got the one working SVG file; I've still got a bunch of my original inspirational/resource images; and I've also got the images I've posted to this blog to help me rebuild all the graphics to the point I was just before the flash drive crapped out.

I'm discouraged; but I'm not giving up. I've already ordered my new flash drive; it's a solid state flash drive, which ought to be more reliable. I'm also gonna be more diligent in backing up my flash drive, from now on; at least once a week.

Once I get the new flash drive, I'm gonna transfer the few files I still have and rebuild the project folder so that I can get back to work on recreating the graphics I had already done, and continue the project.

An Eye for Details

I finally managed to get back to working on the graphics for this project; specifically, I'm still working on the soldiers.

I had previously done a lot of the fixes to the soldier's eyes, to make him look better. Today, I decided to rough out a soldier card, and print it out at actual size to see just how it looked. As suspected, the soldier, once on the card ends up being so small, that a fair bit of the detail I put into the face becomes indistinguishable. Furthermore, the soldier just doesn't have the same whimsical style as the icons; ideally, I think that's a style that I would like to maintain in some fashion throughout the game's artwork.

So, I think it's time to simplify my soldier before I get too far along on him and end up wasting countless hours on details that just won't be visible, and that will create an inconsistent look.

I don't have an image to show this time around; maybe next time.