A busy week, but not for designing.

In-between everything else...

I've tackled a few different projects this week, in between studying and performing in a local Pantomime theatre production.

Two are board-game related, which until I've either finished designing them or my friends decide they don't need my idea suggestion I'll keep under wraps.

But what I can show is a snapshot of the third project that I started today.

Cardiff Castle's shield Coat of Arms of the Despenser family.

It's the shield Coat of Arms design for the Despenser family Cardiff Castle in Wales. Another friend of mine has made a design to be used with geocaching. This is what's on the back of it.
There'll eventually be a hole at the top for a key-ring.
If I get permission I'll post a picture of the completed design.
Surprisingly a test upload to Shapeways showed that even at this stage it would be printable in plastic and metal. Although the metal version would be around £40. Figures.

(Edit : 14 March 2016 - Corrections to factual errors, to do with the Coat of Arms, supplied by Miriam Griffiths via FB. Thank you.)

Slight continuation of last Sundays blog...

I'm not in the right frame of mind to fully continue my blog from last Sunday, so I'll put a few more renders of items I designed for the ill-fated game.

The revealed side of the Attack card.

An item drop. Some sort of 'tech' crystal.

Here's just a mixture, showing both the hand-drawn process and computer generated routes I took.

This was a test render of how the items would be viewed when I originally was going to have a visible shop interface. Items would sit on a table and the player could scroll up and down it.

A collectable for the main characters home.

My final coloured version.

"VitaBar"! A healing item. Would be dropped occasionally.

An the left is an example of how I was getting items to be arranged in a grid system that would allow items to be "packed" together tighter. 

Essentially I put together some code that would arrange all the items together like a jigsaw puzzle. Each item would have a 'grid presence' list, which detailed what part of the grid it occupied.

Instead of just a boring grid layout, everything was all mingled together like a garage sale and only overlapping where they were supposed too.

In the end, the only place this was used was in the character inventory screen. The shop interface was replaced with a scrolling list of purchasable items. I'll try and find the screen-grabs from my iPad.

Testing how many watering-cans can fit together.

Time for sleeps...

That's it for now. I've work in the morning. Ta ta :)