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Designing the counters - traditional form - drawing:
For the red and white rocket ship I decided to design a generic spaceship - I decided to go for this design because the space theme will then be easily recognisable for our target audience.
Next, I went for a 'spaceplane' design. The wings are large just like a typical turbo jet's wings and could easily be recognised as a modern-day aeroplane.
After designing a fairly typical aeroplane design, I decided to aim towards a cartoon style design of a flying saucer. This design is inspired by 'aliens' with its antennae and long 'tentacle-style' claws. This design led me to an idea of 'special attributes' for each rocket ship, for example, the flying saucer could have a special trick of using his tentacle claws to 'steal' another player's weaponry. How ever, some members of the team were skeptical about the idea because it may make the game too confusing.
Here is a design I decided to name "Stealth" in order to be able to refer to each of my designs quickly when communicating with the team. Possible attributes for this spaceship could be it's long, slender wings on this design to give the representation that this spaceship would fly quickly but gracefully through the space environment. The ends of the wings have been styled into 'pincer' shapes, as I feel that pincer features connotate well to the words 'evil' and 'danger'. The body is shaped like a snowmobile as I feel that this machine refers well to 'speed' once again. The size of this spaceship is a lot smaller than the rest of the spaceships. This could make the spaceship difficult to spot, just like a ninja.
This is my design for a UFO-style counter. The tentacle-style legs are inspired by 'aliens' in sci-fi films such as 'Star Trek' and 'Star Wars' and links incredibly well to Tyrone's alien character design. This link is incredibly affective because the 'space' theme is being carried across from counter design to characters in the board game.
I added legs to this counter design as a possible alternative way of movement for the counter, instead of having a flat-based counter. The metal framing around the design adds to the 'futuristic' style of the counter because as my research showed, most spaceships have large circular framing around them.
Here is the developed design of the 'space plane' - I have incorporated jets under the wings which I discovered during the research stages of the project would help power the ship. I decided to colour the front of the aeroplane red, as this resembles a typical fighter plane's front.
With this design I chose a generic rocketship shape - a long, thin body with a sharp tip. The rocket wings are slender, in order to provide a faster speed attribute with this design. I decided to choose three different 'racing-style' colours for the rocketship to have. I feel this adds elements of realism to this design because whilst researching different style rocketships I discovered most ships had white, red or blue colouring to them.
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Designing the counters - digital form - 3D models:
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| A print screen of the loading screen of the program I used to create the models - Maya. |
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| "Stealth" |
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| "UFO" |
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| "Space plane" |
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| "Speed" |
Above are all my digitised models of the rocketship counter designs. There should be six in total, but we will be using Will's designs too, so we shall be splitting the amount of work done by working together. This will be incredibly time-effective for both of us as we can concentrate on putting more detail into our own designs rather than rushing to finish all six designs.
I will be creating a special concept page for each of my designs to present my sketches, models and a short paragraph on each of my designs.
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Creating the counters:
My team and I have decided to use a stand-up style counter. This style basically involves having a solid base at the bottom, and a slot at the top which will be thin enough to hold a picture - in this case, the imagery will be of the spaceships that Will and I designed.
Above is an example of a counter we will hopefully be creating this week. I spoke to the team about different ideas on what base shape to use, whether it be a slanted trapezium shape or different, and then spoke to Nathan (the board designer) about the counter space sizes, which are 15mm x 15mm.
I was not expecting the sizes to be as small as this and found it hard to find bases that would fit to such a small measurement. How ever, to over come this problem, Nathan has told me that he has some scrap plastic left that will allow us to make the counters.
Whilst we wait for the plastics to be delivered, I have decided to start designing the pictures that will slot into the plastic base of the counter in Photoshop. I compiled all the designs I have so far, and resized them into the 3 different ship sizes we have planned to use:
- small
- medium
- large
This week I shall be visiting the staff involved in the printing department, and ask for their advice on what type of paper/card to use for our counter pictures.
More updates to come soon!
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