Category Archives: Games

Colour Bind, Games

Colour Bind trophy building – part 3

Rightio, so I believe last time I was just about to get up to painting. Well, there’s not much to say here I suppose – here’s a photo of me painting stuff:

Wallpaper by the beautiful and talented Darren Geers
Awesome desktop wallpaper included to provide contrast with my meager painting skills.

That wallpaper is pretty cool, by the way. Anyway, at the moment I’m painting the black bits black and everything else can wait until later. Here’s the front:

And it says 'Halley' because that's my girlfriend's name and the bit of cardboard belongs to her. Not really.
That bucket is because we had a leaky roof

What may be less apparent in this photo is that I’m dipping the three prongs from the back of the goal triangle in some green paint. You can also kind of see that I’m holding the wooden curvy bit in my other hand. The reasons for all of this are ingenious, and explained in the next photo:

Brilliant. Yes.
Brilliant, no?

So, now my cunning plan comes together. By marking the base with green paint from the pegs, I can now drill holes there of the appropriate size and fit them into the wooden base. I actually took kind of decent photos of this, so I’ll let them do the talking.

The lack of green around the holes is promising
Holes drilled, moment of truth approaching…
I was so proud that this worked first go - you have no idea
Success!

Okay this is awesome. The pegs fit into the holes so well that I could actually hold the whole thing by the base, or the triangle bit, without them falling apart. I’m pretty surprised that worked so well, actually. I’ll still glue them in, but it’s nice to be able to see roughly how this is going to look.

Anyway, that’s enough painting there for the moment. The other things that need painting are the curvy wooden bases. My plan here is to undercoat with black paint, then mix up some grey (I bought red, green, blue, yellow, white, and black paint) to put over it. There’s not really much to say here, but I’ve provided some action shots anyway.

In fact there are kind of slinkies everywhere in this photo. My secret shame!
Yes, that is a big tower of small metal slinky springs in the background.

You might think, based on this photo, that I have cleverly masked out the base of the trophy so I don’t accidentally get paint all over the pretty wooden base. But you’d be wrong, because it was in fact my girlfriend, Halley, who did that, using her amazing artist skills. This is nothing though – the masking necessary for the goal triangle is even cooler. But before we get to that, one last thing. I realised, after painting this thing with about five layers of grey paint, that one of the edges was unacceptably uneven. I figured I should be as much of a perfectionist as was necessary for the recipient of the trophy to finish all the secret levels, so I once again grabbed the whittling knife and went back to the chopping section of the project:

Background featuring chainsaw, brushcutter, and spare harpsichord
I like the way you can see the layers of paint in this photo

Anyway, long story short: It took a surprising amount of re-paintings to make the colour of the freshly whittled bit smooth with the rest of it, but the upside of so many coats of paint is that the bits where I screwed up slightly have been thoroughly concealed by paint now. But, I got there in the end.

Somewhere during all of this, I had been asking around regarding some competent people who might like to laser etch some name plates for these things. A friend of mine recommended the good people at 5 Star Trophies, and I got in touch. Before long, they had sent me the following bundle of goodness:

They have cool sticky stuff on the back too
Secret fact: These aren’t actually metal, they just look that way

Now, I made a mistake here. I was expecting to be screwing these things to the front, so I asked them to put holes in, but that turned out to be both problematic and unnecessary, since the screws wouldn’t sit flush and it looked crummy, plus I can get the plates with sticky stuff on the back and that will do a good job of holding things in place. After ruining a few of the above pictured plates, I gave up and re-ordered them without the holes. 5 Star Trophies gave me the second set half price, too, so that was nice of them.

The exciting thing here is that now, I’m able to finish two of the trophies! The two simpler ones, for all the gold medals (just a car on a base) and for the coop levels (two cars ‘high fiving’ on a base, have all their parts assembled. The bases are good to go, the nameplates are ready, now I just have to drill holes and glue stuff in. Here’s a hideous monstrosity that I created while practicing various methods of screwing things together:

Also: See how much better the car looks painted?
I needed to figure out how to drill holes and drive screws somehow, right?

The tricky bit was drilling the holes for the car prongs just the right distance apart, so the car would sit in there reasonably tightly and not fall out, but I got there in the end. All I have to do is the same thing on the real trophy base, apply a sticker, and…

Still quite pleased with that base, given it was made out of firewood and all.
Bam! First trophy finished!

This was a pretty exciting milestone because this whole process has taken ages. And what’s more, the coop trophy is also finishable with a similar amount of work – in fact, it’s easier, because I have slightly more wiggle room for the hole placement.

I lucked out and found a slice of wood with two sets of concentric circles in the grain. Symbolism.
Part two complete! Sorry this photo is a little blurry.

Okay! So, two down, two to go! And one of the remaining two is all but finished at this point. Unfortunately, the remaining paint job is by far the most daunting. Plus, I’ve got to figure out a way to package these things so that they don’t get destroyed in transit. For the exciting conclusion, you’ll have to read the next entry, coming up right now.

Colour Bind, Games

Colour Bind trophy building – part 2

Okay, back into it! Last thing that happened was I shamefully confessed my incompetence about using green wood for the trophy bases and having them split. But, no real harm done – I got some other wood and repeated the same procedure, and it went better.

More importantly, I was about to experiment with colouring these white plastic prints. I’ve heard a few people recommend using textas (like a sharpie, I believe, for those who don’t know what textas are), which seems like a dubious option. However, I made a mistake on one of the models – the suspension line on the car which is supposed to be at right angles to the car body was actually rotated a bit. Various people have told me that I am being obsessive throwing this one out, and they might be right, but if anyone is going to notice besides me it’ll be the people who played the game enough to win the trophies, right? Right. So I’m going to practice colouring this thing green.

Textas work well on fingers too
Half way done green car

By the way, see how the suspension lines in this model aren’t parallel to each other like they should be? Poor form on my part, but at least it meant I have a print to experiment with.

In retrospect, I could have seen this coming
Pretty good even colour, but I couldn’t get into the crevices

As you can see, textas are pretty good for this purpose – I would wholeheartedly recommend them sometimes. But for this, ultimately, I couldn’t colour the whole thing – there’s no good way to get the texta down behind the wheels, and in practice, it’s pretty noticeable. Dang. Well, that brings me to attempt number two – I’ve got to dye these things. I found a helpful youtube video that told me how to dye shapeways plastic – so, let’s go with that. I’m going to make the gold medal car red, the co-op cars blue and green, and the secret trophy car blue (I asked Asier which he preferred). The goal triangle model won’t be dyed – it has to be different colours so that will take a different approach. I got some blue and red Rit dye, but they didn’t have any in a good green colour so I got a different brand called Dylon (the lady at the shop told me it was the same kind of thing). Naturally, step one is to clean the models with a toothbrush.

Weights in background included to give false impression that I work out
This part of the process was as exciting as it looked

Then came the mixing part. You see here half water, half vinegar, with a probably excessive amount of blue dye mixed in.

Does the phrase "so blue that it's pretty much black" even make sense?
Primed and ready

Look at the car in the background there. It looks so clean! But, not for long. In we go.

This next part of the process took a while, featuring me initially freaking out that it’s not blue enough. In fact, I think I did that with all the dye jobs (although in some cases I was freaking out that it wasn’t red/green enough instead). But, so far, so good! I particularly enjoyed the car shapes on the paper where I dried it off while re-microwaving the mixture.

Only three to go
So far, so good!

After that, I had a minor hiccup with the creation of the green dye. I may have done some bad chemistry here, but in the end it worked fine.

It's not even a real table so much as a big piece of chipboard
Now I have a green table, so, that’s cool too

With the red car, I had a bigger problem. Let’s just say, any of you out there planning to dye shapeways white plastic red, don’t use Rit scarlet dye. I’m sure it works great on fabric, but…

Credit where it's due though - the paper towel turned a pretty good red
This is really not the bright vibrant red I was hoping for

Okay, so, that colour is kinda terrible. I can’t go around calling that a red Colour Bind car – it would make a mockery of everything I stand for. I fixed it by painting over it with some red paint. This actually worked much better than I was expecting – I was worried it would ruin the texture of the model, but figured if it didn’t work I’d just have to re-print the model but at this point that would be necessary anyway. But instead, it worked perfectly! Unfortunately, I didn’t take a photo of this at this stage – but this car will reappear later so you can check out its proper colour then.

Okay so there’s one other thing I’m going to talk about. If you go back to the first blog post and look at the initial 3D models, you can see that the car in the Secret Levels trophy is sitting on a sort of curvy platform, not dissimilar to the shapes in the game. Likewise, the goal triangle in the 15 Platinums trophy is supported by a similar curvy shape. Since I’m no longer planning to 3D print these bits, I needed an alternative plan.

I tried a few things. Initially I thought the best would be to get a bit of thick grey plastic and cut it into shape, but obtaining plastic of that nature turned out to be harder than I was expecting. I tried out a similar plan with one of those plastic chopping boards from the supermarket, but it didn’t receive dye or cut very well, so I gave up on that and got some extremely fine chip board. It’s strange stuff – kind of more like very thick/dense cardboard than wood. But, hopefully, this would do the trick.

My initial plans to cut the shape out roughly with a bandsaw failed due to inferior cornering ability, but a quick wikipedia search revealed that what I really wanted was a coping saw. Predictably, a quick search of dad’s workshop revealed that we had one already. I cut the very rough shape with a bandsaw and then drew a guide line with a biro and got to it.

Done. Ship it.
That’s the easy bit done

I have a few more cuts to make, obviously. Incidentally, in the above photo it’s actually screwed to the base (that is, screws going up through the base and into the underneath of the shaped bit) – I figured I was less likely to split the wood/cardboard/whatever if I drilled holes in it now rather than after it was cut into shape. Spoiler warning: It kind of split anyway, but it wasn’t too bad. Anyway, I also drilled the little hole for the car’s peg thingy to fit in, to make sure the whole thing was going to work, and it seemed pretty good. So, I disassembled everything and got back into it with the coping saw.

Way too many offcuts of failure in the background here
Getting this shape was a bit tricky – had to be done in two parts

And after part two:

Can't really get sand paper in there, either
Here it is after part two, but it’s a little rough

So clearly that ‘curve’ I’ve created is less curvy than is ideal, and I can’t easily sand it down like I can the other curves because there’s no room. A while ago, I tried my hand at whittling, and I have a nice sharp knife around, so I decided to try whittling the corner away to a slightly nicer curve. Here was the result:

Shame about that over-cut - will have to fix it in post
Not bad – hopefully will look nicer when painted.

Now, clearly this is not finished yet. However, once again, this is one of those times I foolishly failed to take more photographs, so you’ll have to wait and see how the other cuts went. Long story short, though, I cut the other bits out and then sanded the whole thing a whole bunch. I also made the shape for the other curvy bit, using basically the same method – more on that later.

Next up, I’m going to be painting some stuff. The wooden curvy stand things need to be a nice shade of grey, and I’ve got to figure out some kind of plan for the coloured goal triangle too. That’s it for now though – I’ll be covering that stuff in the next post.

Colour Bind, Games

Colour Bind trophy building – part 1

This is going to be a long one.

You can find some of the backstory explaining this elsewhere on the blog, but to cut a long story short, I made a game. It is called Colour Bind. It’s a physics/puzzle/platform game, and it’s quite challenging. I promised physical trophies would be mailed to people who were the first to achieve various epic feats of brilliance in the game.

This is the story of these trophies.

Now, it’s important to note that I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to making physical stuff, and I don’t have much of a budget either. What I do have is access to my late father’s workshop (I say without hyperbole that he was a million times better at this kind of thing than I could ever hope to be), and an internet full of advice on how to do things. I was determined to make the trophies like the game – not necessarily perfect, but unique, and made by me according to my own twisted sense of aesthetics. So, off we go.

My first thought? 3D print these suckers. Shapeways lets you print stuff in all manner of crazy materials – I can just make the things in some 3D modelling software and then send them off and we’re all good. Here’s what I came up with:

It seems like so long ago that I made these things.
Straight from my modelling program. Not to scale.

Pretty ace, right? I thought so too, even if I didn’t get around to attaching Asier’s name to the trophy before I took these screenshots. Anyway, you see what I’m going for. The All Gold and the Coop trophies are the simper ones, but the 15 Platinums (platina?) and the Secret Levels trophies are a bit fancier, because those are the two very difficult ones. I was all set to go. After some wrangling to get them into the right file type (the polygon soup outputted by programs like 3dsmax isn’t what you want – volumetric data is what 3D printers crave), I uploaded them to Shapeways. To my considerable suprise, I had managed to create them all devoid of geometry problems, first time, and they were ready to print!

Unfortunately, there was a bit of a snag. If I wanted them to be of a reasonable size, this was going to set me back quite a bit, even if I just printed them in the cheapest white plastic – certainly getting them in stainless steel or anything fancy like that was going to cost hundreds of dollars at this size. So, I need a better plan.

I got to thinking – printing the cars and stuff makes sense, because I don’t know how I’d go about building one of those cars by hand. But the trophy bases, as well as the curvy bits in the Secret and Platinum trophies, are simple enough shapes – maybe I can make them in some other way.

My new plan is to make the bases out of a slice of wood. I live on a farm, so wood should be reasonably accessible, right? I get a small log, cut a slice of it, and from that slice I shall shave off a face, and that face will give me a place to attach a plaque. Then I can put the model on that. That’ll save quite a bit of 3D printing volume already, and might also make the trophies more interesting.

So, let’s get started. As luck would have it, I had to cut down a couple of almond trees a few months ago (don’t feel bad for them – they were rubbish at actually growing almonds), so I’ll cut myself a slice of that and see how it goes.

Chainsawing almond tree
Gratuitous chainsawing photo

There was also some cutting with a regular hand saw in there, but it didn’t make for very interesting photos, so I’m just going to cut to the ‘finished’ product. Don’t act like you’re not jealous of my double glasses set up here, either.

This was the least bad photo I had of this, I swear.
The flat bit is where the plaque would go.

I’ll go into more detail later about whether or not my plan to use totally green almond wood for the base works out well (it doesn’t), but around this time I was distracted because my 3D prints had arrived! Check it out:

3D printing is so cool
A handful of Colour Bind cars, and one goal triangle thingy.

These things are so cool! The ability to go from 3D model to 3D object like this is kind of magical. I’m definitely planning on doing some more of this in the future.

From left to right in my left hand, we have – little blue car that I printed for fun and to see what the colour prints were like, gold medal car, secret levels car (note that it’s riding low on its suspension, just like in the game!), the two coop trophy cars, and then another car for a separate thing that I screwed up and didn’t end up using. And of course in my right hand is the medal thing that goes on the platinum trophy. Note the little pegs that most of the models have, to attach them to the various things they need to get attached to. In my next post on the subject, I’ll be talking about taking these prints from white plastic to the colours I need them to be, including the rather onerous problem of getting the goal triangle to be a blend of red, green, and blue.

Before I do that, though, a brief note about the trophy bases. Of all the dumb mistakes I made on this project, the one where I really should have (and on some level, did) know better was cutting a base from undried wood. Woodworkers reading this will know where this is going – when wood dries it will warp and crack, and that’s exactly what happened with this. In the end, the almond wood bases that I made were thrown away, and I did basically the same process to cut some more out of some redgum we have (firewood – nice and dry), as well as some other nice-looking stuff I found downstairs that I think Dad cut from a cherry tree years ago and kept it for some project that never happened. For some reason, I neglected to take any photos of that, so you’ll just have to trust me – the bases show up in later photos, of course, so you’ll see what I’m talking about in the next couple of posts.