The game that almost was...the start of my 3D design journey.

The opening image. It would have had the title rotating.

Humble intentions...

Back in 2014 2013 (My bad memory :p ) I attempted to make my own game for the iPad.
The main game mechanic was going to be combat using matching pairs of cards, quite similar to the card game memory. The overall theme was that everything took place on a theatre stage, with monsters being knocked out when defeated.

The game was to be called "Adventure Card Theatre". As you may have noticed, there was a big spelling mistake on the main title graphic.

Oops. Spelt theatre wrong :p

I spent the early part of 2014 2013 building the mechanics of the game, with the intention that all the imagery would be hand drawn.

Combat stage, with card trapdoors open.

Now, as with all game development; There were the numerous rewrites of code, changing of game mechanics, battling of odd programming library behaviour as well adapting to the programming language updates that Apple would issue far too frequently for my liking.
It didn't help that 2014 was the start of Apple introducing their 'new' programming language "Swift".


By the time I'd gotten the main game mechanics sorted; going away from a scrolling map for choosing missions, to just a list of missions and an in-built shop from which to buy items.

It began to dawn on me that I still had quite a large amount of content to create.

Journey into 3D design

The biggest problem would have been the animation for all the characters. I knew from watching the 'making-of' documentaries of animated films and computer games, that it was possible to create a character in 3D and then move it about using some sort of skeleton animation system.

So I did some searching on the net and discovered Blender. A quite comprehensive and full of features design software. I had always wanted to get to grips with 3D designing, but never had a strong enough push to learn.

Now I had.

After much learning using Blender's own website of numerous tutorials and experimenting, I started to play with creating one of the main characters.

As you can see, not only was I learning to model my creations, but learning how to use Blender in a sensible way. What looks good, what doesn't.

Over many redesigns I eventually approached my original hand drawings.

Not perfect, but it was too a level I was happy with to start to integrating into my game.


My next steps where more daunting; The creation of a layering system so that I could make the items in the characters hands interchangeable. And the items themselves And the monsters.

That's all for this Sunday.

I'll continue telling my journey next Sunday. Here's one of my wallpaper renders of some of the items...