Adrian Herbez Rotating Header Image

Posts from ‘July, 2011’

Collectible Dart Game: paper prototype

I was playing Magic: The Gathering recently with a friend at a local bar that so happens to have a dedicated darts room.

That got me thinking- why not have a collectible darts game? After some thought, I nailed down a rough draft of a design, with the following elements:

  • The collectible/swappable component is the fins of the dart (“flight”) on which is printed stats and abilities
  • The setting/theme of the game is future fantasy, with players competing to mine resources from a planet (the dartboard) by sending units down to the surface (throwing darts)
  • All units have:
    1. a mining stat, combined with the value of the section the dart hits to determine amount of resources gathered
    2. a combat stat, used to resolve combat between units
    3. [optionally] an activated ability of some kind, for example: [R] + 5 to mining, which would mean that if the dart lands inside a red section of the board, it earns 5 extra units of resources
  • Play proceeds with players alternating to throw darts
  • Combat is resolved at the end of a round, and the resource totals are added to each player’s running tally
  • The first player to gather a set number of resources (100?) wins

I’m still thinking through the combat system, but in the meantime I wanted to be able to generate some prototype pieces to start playtesting. As such, I wrote a small Python program that accepts a text file describing units and generates a printable PDF that can be used to make flights. I’ll likely be changing the design of the flights a bit (altering the shape and making them slightly bigger), but it’s a good start. To see the generated PDF, go here.

projects ,

More fun with OpenSCAD

So I’ve been having a great time with OpenSCAD of late, and made a couple of small models:

  1. a parametric Lincoln Log-style building piece (with options for diameter, length, and number of slots)
  2. a die-like cube for tracking damage in World of Darkness pen-and-paper RPGs

I love OpenSCAD, and I also love thingiverse. To check out the models and download them for yourself, head over to my thinigiverse profile.

projects , ,

Binary rings (via OpenSCAD)

So a while ago, I started in on a project to create a tool for generating wearable ring models with text encoded in binary based on the ASCII values of each character. I put the project aside a while back, but recently I discovered OpenSCAD, a fantastic tool for programmatically defining 3d models.

OpenSCAD totally rocks, but is a little strange in that variables aren’t, strictly speaking variable, since you can’t change their value. As a result, instead of writing openSCAD directly, I created a Python script that takes a string as a command line argument and generates the OpenSCAD code to make a ring with that phrase around it. The above image encodes ‘OpenSCAD rocks my world’.

The next steps are to make the script take a ring size and thickness, and then I’ll likely be setting up shop on Shapeways to sell these.

projects , , , ,