Scratch building gaming terrain for Wild West board game

The laser cutting to make linka-like moulds at BuildBrighton was a bit of a failure last night. The laser cutter is, once again, out of action. We really need to spend some time down at our new unit getting our laser cutter up and running, so we can just crank this sort of stuff out!

In the meantime, after seeking some advice, we tried scratch building some Wild West style buildings. There are a number of companies online selling laser-cut buildings, which are great for modern games, or near-future type boards - but for old Western type games, they all look a little bit "regular".

This is a typical Wild West type building. It's weather bleached and a little bit higgledy-piggledy. The board planks are warped and all over the place. This is quite difficult to recreate with a sheet of uniform, laser cut, 2mm or 3mm mdf.

Someone at our local model store suggested coffee stirrers as planks.
It seemed like a good idea, so we set about making a wooden shack from actual wood

We started out making a basic framework for our building using some 3mm foamcore board. Then stuck a load of coffee stirrers to the front side and cut them to length. We deliberately cut them off the board, then placed the shorter lengths onto the foamcore. This helped to create the slightly wobbly, less-than-perfect edges along the sides of the building

It would have been easier to glue all the planks in place, then just run a knife blade along the edges, but because our wood is still quite regular (and a bit chunkier than the thin planks used in the building in the photo) we tried to emphasise the rough look of the building by making the edges irregular and a bit out-of-alignment.

Making the building was actually quite a nice process - far more "art-and-crafty" than the usual "engineering and construction" approach used (when building rooms from the Hirst Art moulds). While the glue dried, we taped the sides together and checked the overall size against one of our 28mm Wild West miniatures.

The front of the building was extended beyond the roof level, as was common with commercial buildings in Old West towns. The building is 3 squares wide and 2 squares deep. It's a little on the small side for an actual, to-scale building (but a bit too large to be an outhouse) but it looks fine against the miniature as a generic wooden building. Maybe a simple sign on the top part of the front would make this look like a believable "general stores" or something?

The roof for the building could be made from a number of materials.
A lot of buildings had simple wooden shingles, many had corrugated tin roofs, and occasionally a brick/stone building might have a slate/tiled roof. We couldn't  decide which to go with, and eventually settled on shingles.

Our local model shop has sheets of plasticard for a quid a pop which was perfect for trying out a few ideas. Before we actually started on our roof, we looked again at the reference photo and decided that our coffee stirrer building still looked a little regular. What we needed was an overlapping plank built building.

We cut some of the plasticard into strips. Luckily we didn't have a steel ruler to hand, and pressed just a little too hard with the knife blade, which created the exaggerated, wobbly edges. Horrible for a cut plastic edge, but perfect as some rough-cut wooden planks.

Along the length of each plank we ran the tip of a craft knife, to create a wood grain effect.
Although it's not easy to see this on the white plastic surface, once it's painted and drybrushed, the deep cut, along with the slightly raised edges on each side of the cut, will give a really strong, visible wood grain.

Perhaps it was the solvent fumes from our plastic cement, but once we had a decent stretch of "planked wall section" from plasticard strips, we had a crazy idea about using the same technique for our shingle roof. Except instead of using strips, we'd cut each strip into individual shingles, and glue them together to make a roof. What a bonkers idea!

We took some of the left-over strips from the wall section, and cut a few more, then sliced them into roughly rectangular shapes. Luckily everything in our Wild West reference picture was made from rough-hewn wood - slightly dodgy shingles with uneven sizes and wobbly edges are just what we need!

Making the roof was a slow, tedious job. Every layer or two we had to wait for the plastic cement to dry enough to make the previous row secure (it works by melting the plastics together, so the shingles are really fragile on the roof, until the glue has dried fully). But after a little while, the roof was complete.

In place it looks ok. The whole building looks fine. It needs a layer of paint and maybe it'll start to come to life. We're really pleased with the (painstakingly built) roof and the rest of the building looks not to bad - it certainly has more character than some of the rather flat, laser-cut western buildings available online.

Our plasticard isn't really thick enough to make the awning frame from, so perhaps some laser cut mdf just for that would suffice - then we can stick a rough-cut planked roof, or maybe some corrugated metal on top to finish the model. A large sign for the top part of the frontage, perhaps with a thin wooden frame would be more inkeeping with our slightly more regular house-build than a hand-painted sign (as per the reference photo) and that's our first western building done!

We'd like to have another go at making some more western style buildings, using the plasticard strips, as well as trying the odd brick building (maybe a bank or a hotel). But the thought of making more of those roof sections is a bit daunting.

So before we go sticking everything together, we might just dig out some silicone and have a go at making a mould of this roof section. If it's thick enough (our current roof section is at least as thick as the Linka wall pieces we made the other day, but much larger) it'd be far easier to just pour some (dental) plaster into a mould in a few minutes, than spend two hours or more gluing each individual roof tile in place!

Linka gaming terrain moulds

Paul has been busy casting loads of Hirst Art pieces for our Space Raiders boardgame terrain - enough to make a few decent sized rooms at least! He also came across some alternative moulds from the late 70s/early 80s called Linka.

Just like Hirst Arts moulds, these are best used with dental plaster/stone, to make solid, robust wall sections. Unlike Hirst Arts, the walls are more like thin, flat panels, than blocks to make walls from.

The moulds cast really easily and the pieces, although thin, are relatively easy to get out without too many breaking and snapping during de-moulding (some of the long, thin sections are susceptible to breaking as the mould is flexed to get the other sections out)

One really nice element to the pieces is the way they can be connected either in a long, flat section, or at right angles, to make nice, sturdy wall pieces.

These moulds were originally created for Hornby 0-gauge and 00-gauge model railways. As such, they're not quite to the right scale for our 28mm miniatures.

The 0-gauge stuff looks fine against a 28mm western-styled miniature. The bricks may appear a little larger than if they were made to the same scale as the character, but they're not completely out-of-scale. Given that most 28mm miniatures have "cartoon" proportions (large heads, feet and hands) having larger-than-they-should-be bricks in a wall section isn't the end of the world.

The smaller 00-gauge stuff also looks ok, set against a 28mm character. In fact, the bricks look more in scale to the character than the 0-gauge sections.

But it's immediately obvious that the doors and windows are far too small for this size playing piece. What we need is something somewhere inbetween....

Using the Linka moulds as "inspiration" (we definitely did not just rip off their idea but make the wall sections a little larger) we drew some wall sections in Inkscape, but made them a little larger.

We kept the interlocking edges so multiple pieces could easily be connected together. However, we made each wall section almost as high as a playing piece. By creating some "full-height" and some "half-height" pieces, they can be stacked one on top of the other to create either single-storey or multi-storey buildings.

We made each wall section in 1", 1.5" and 2" sizes.

(In the image above, we've incorrectly labelled the 1/4" section as half-inch. Sizes are approximate: a one inch section is 7 bricks across, but a quarter-inch section is two bricks across. Obviously, four of these sections would be longer than a single, one inch section - the length, in inches, is really only a guide, to help determine how many playing squares each wall section would cover)

After placing the layouts alongside some 1" squares (our board game playing surface uses 1" squares) it became apparent that we'd need to do some jiggling about:

To place a door, for example, it would either have to go in the centre of a single 1" piece or to one side of a longer 2" piece. In either case, we'll end up with a door frame very close to one edge of a wall section, which is potentially a point of weakness. We can't place a door in the middle of a 2" piece, because then, when it is placed on the board, it would fall between two playing squares, and not line up with a single one.

An alternative to this is to create a 1.5" wall section, into which we can put our doorway, allowing about a quarter of an inch of material around the sides of it. In this way, we can put the door in the middle of the playing piece, but we'd need either quarter-inch or three-quarter-inch wall sections to go on either side, to create either a 2" or 3" long wall section.

As we couldn't decide which to choose, we drew both.

As we already have some liquid silicone and catalyst here, the idea to laser cut and engrave the brick pattern onto some 3mm acrylic and - assuming everything works as we hope - make a rubber mould of the final piece; this will allow us to make multiple wall sections quickly and easily from our dental plaster, without tying up the laser cutter for hours at a time!

Progress will be reported (successful or otherwise) in a later blog post......

RFID reader for BiuldBrighton door pt II

The RFID reader door-opening mechanism at BuildBrighton went a bit funny a few days back. The screen was full of garbled characters and the system got into a "locked up" state, so that no-one could use the door entry system! As we were using "in-development" firmware, there was no clever trickery like watchdog timers keeping everything in check, it just locked up and stayed locked up.

We're not sure of the exact cause of the failure, but given that we noticed there was no flyback diode on the relay coil, there's a good chance some negative voltage has caused it to go screwy!

After failing (and once someone had arrived at the hackspace with an actual piece-of-metal key to open the door) it also looked like someone had had a go at fixing it - not be consulting the schematics, reading the firmware or tracing back the wires to see how it worked - more like poking odd wires into odd holes. No wonder it stopped working!

So the new v2 version is going to have to be soldered together, to stop little fingers from poking about with the wires. While we're about it, we're also using on of Arthur's really cool ethernet-to-UART modules to do the talking to the BB members website.

At about midnight last night, we finally got a working duplicate copy of the door opening mechanism. We made everything that needed to connect to anything else use a socket (or in some places, a 0.1" pitch pin header) which helped with the modular prototyping. Arthur soldered up the wires from the door into a number of "plugs" using some more 0.1" pin header and plugged it all in.

Amazingly, it worked pretty much first time (although, it had taken about four hours to solder up the perfboard, inbetween helping out other members, drinking tea, munching pizza, doing some laser training and cutting parts for another project).

BuildBrighton once again has a working door entry system.

Which means we can get back to our own personal projects for next time ;-)

How Hirst Arts moulds can change your game

Not just because they create really impressive looking terrain. Not even because you can end up with loads of modular sections which allow you to create thousands of combinations of Space-Hulk style corridors. In our case, the need (ok, the desire) to use the Hirst Art moulds has actually made us change the way we've approached our gameplay.

Originally, all our board sections were designed on a strict 1" grid. All walls were either exactly horizontal or vertical (following the lines of the grid) and each wall filled one square-width.

Collision detection was easy - draw a line from the centre of the start square to the centre of the destination square and walk along it. If, at any point, you hit a square containing an obstacle, the line of sight (or line of firing, it uses the same algorithm) is interrupted where the collision occurs.

However, with the Hirst Arts moulds, we've had to make a few changes.
To begin with, we've had to offset some doors and entrance-ways on the rooms, deviating slightly from the "how to" guides on the Hirst Arts website. The way they are designed in the online guides puts the door in the dead centre of a two-square wide room

On a playing surface with no grid (a typical wargaming table for example) this causes no problems. So that our doors still line up with our grid (along with the walls etc, while still trying to get the maximum playable area within each room) we've moved the door sections across by half-a-square, and replaced the pillars on either side with a single-pieced section, off to one side

In the image above, we can see already where our problems are going to stem from, if we stick with the rule that each wall occupies one floor-tile-width, when it comes to calculating line of sight, and line of firing.

Even if the corner pieces cannot be walked through (the corner section takes up too much room to be able to comfortably place a 25mm base in the square) it's pretty obvious that a character placed in  the centre square below the wall should be able to see the square diagonally opposite. But with the "one wall takes a sqaure" rule for line-of-sight checks, this LOS would fail, and potentially spoil the effect on the game.

When it comes to corner pieces, the answer is simple - remove the corner pieces from the "collision map" when checking for line-of-sight (and line-of-firing)

Now anyone standing in the centre square below the bottom wall can see all squares diagonally. The LOS goes through the corner squares containing a small piece of the wall, but this isn't enough to cause the line-of-sight check to fail, and shouldn't stop a character firing at another square, diagonally across from them.

But even this doesn't actually fix the problem. The problem is that the walls don't take up one square width. And sometimes our line-of-sight check is going to fail incorrectly, because of the angle between the source and destination squares, not just because of corner pieces on room edges. For example:

By using a full square-width for our line-of-sight checks, this would cause one character to be invisible to another - the line-of-sight passes through a square containing a wall section. But if we ignore the darker shaded areas, we can see that in this case both characters would be able to see past the rounded corner of the wall, and should be able to see each other. Here's another example:

A character on the green square should be able to see a character on the blue square. The amount of wall in the way is negligible. But the line-of-sight check still passes through a square which contains a wall section - even though it's not directly in the line of sight between the centre-points of the two squares. Using the current grid-based approach to line-of-sight, we'd still be getting a hit with the wall, when quite clearly there shouldn't be one!

However, the Hirst Art moulds are just too nice not to look at. There are plenty of war-gaming and tabletop gaming fans out there, not only with the moulds, but with some really nice (non-regular) terrain, just waiting to be used in a game like this. So we need to find a way of accommodating different, not-so-blocky rooms and layouts. And the obvious answer is... another software re-write!

This time, our board game (in the app) consists of a graphic/image layer, depicting the map as the playing surface - and underneath this layer (invisible to the player) is a one-bit collision map. We're going to use the grid as a guide for the movement of playing pieces (and for calculating proximity between pieces and special squares on the board) but for line-of-sight, and firing, we're going to pretend the grid simply doesn't exist.

So when playing a game like this, the collision map can have any shaped room, with walls of any thickness, placed directly on the grid, or slightly offset from it. Of course, this is going to make an online editor a little more complicated to code (and maybe even to use) but the end result will not just be a better looking game, but a game with much better (and more accurate) gameplay. And if it helps improve the gameplay, there's no way we're leaving it out!

Now, time to get coding again....

Google Ketchup and Hirst Arts moulds, first room test

First up, Google Sketchup is a great tool - once you've worked out the interface - for arranging Hirst Art castings into something resembling a playing surface. Simply enter "Hirst xx" where xx is the mould number you're looking to use, and the chances are it'll appear in the 3d model warehouse. At least, this worked for all the moulds we've currently got!

Some 3d models are drawn lifesize (i.e. a 3" pipe appears as a 3" object) and some are drawn life-sized (i.e. a 1" object is drawn as a 4ft object). Mixing and matching models isn't difficult though: if the stuff drawn in inches is imported into a drawing drawn in feet, simply scale up x48 and everything appears just fine.

Here's a final map for our first space-shooter-board game.
Unlike our spaceship-based game with shaped PCBs (which looked more like a Space Hulk type game) this map actually resembles a board-game-based version of our favourite ZX Spectrum strategy game, Laser Squad. We think this makes it all the more impressive!

(the pipes in this map were originally drawn as 1", 2" and 3" sections, whereas everything else on the map was drawn at 1"=4ft. Simply scaling the pipes by 48 put everything into the same scale)

We've spent a few evenings casting a number of blocks and wall pieces from our Hirst Arts moulds. The dental plaster gives a noticeably better (and harder) finish - even without having to "bake" the plaster in the sunshine for two days to remove all traces of water. In future we'll use dental plaster exclusively, but for now we've three boxes of the pesky things in plaster of Paris to use up!

After finally spending some time at the new unit in the Boiler Room studios, we spent a bit of time "dry fitting" some of these plaster shapes, to actually make the rooms, as terrain for our board game.

To begin with we copied and pasted each room section into a new Google Sketchup document and manually moved the pieces outwards from their starting poistions, to create an "exploded view". This not only helped identify which pieces were used in each room, but also helped us get familiar with which blocks made up which rooms, while making the exploded view images.

Putting the rooms together was just a case of finding the appropriate blocks, sanding them where necessary to make the scraped edges absolutely flat, and placing them in the right place on the table. Some of the pieces appear mis-aligned; this is just where the blocks have rested after being placed - when the rooms are made up properly and glued in place, all the walls line up perfectly to give a solid, continuous wall.

It was while we were fitting out the rooms like this that we discovered the true difference between plaster of Paris and our Witestone Ultrahard Orthodontic (type III) plaster - when sanding the plaster of Paris on some wet-and-dry super-fine paper, some - presumably slightly damp, even after three or four days - blocks created a creamy goop on the paper and edges of the block. The dental plaster, however, created a nice, dry, fine powder when sanded. All the more reason to stick to dental plaster in future!

Despite having what feels like millions of blocks, having cast each mould in full each time, we ran out of the "big vertical pipe" blocks after making up just two rooms. We've still got loads of little filler squares and other useless bits and pieces, but some blocks we're already short of.

Maybe the answer is to take the best-cast wall sections, and make our own silicone moulds from an 8-up or 10-up arrangement of blocks - so instead of casting one of each wall section with each cast, we can get 8 or 10 of just the blocks we need at a time. There's a litre bottle of liquid silicone and catalyst somewhere around here.....

Designing layouts for Hirst Arts moulds using Google Sketchup

Having spent a few evenings casting walls and doors for some sci-fi themed rooms, it was really hard not to go crazy and buy up more Hirst Arts moulds. So hard, in fact, that we now have mould numbers #301, #303, #320, #321, as well as the industrial edging mould #325.

The dental plaster turned up (about 10kg of the stuff - we had no idea what volume this was - it turns out, it's quite a lot!) so we've been busy casting more doors, walls, furniture, pipes, tank barrels, and a whole heap of other bits and bobs for making up some board game terrain.

Dental plaster is a great medium for casting these little blocks. Because it sets much harder than plaster of paris, and is much more resistant to chipping and damage, we can make up the gloopy mix just a little thinner than PoP. Using the "wet water" trick (spraying the moulds with window cleaner before starting) this thinner mixture helps reduce air bubbles in the casts. We've not yet got to the point where every cast is perfect, but a lot of our blocks are "good enough".

Just like using regular plaster of paris, we found that the dental plaster sets much harder, and takes on a slightly whiter appearance after a few hours "baking" in the sunshine.

Note the third and fourth blocks (from the left) are fresh out of the mould, and are slightly discoloured compared to the other pieces, which have had a full day drying out in the sunshine.

Thankfully we've had some really nice weather here at Nerd Towers, so the front garden has been filled with tray upon tray of plaster shapes, during the daytime, while they dry out.

We've now got a few boxes full of little shaped and pieces, so it's time to start fitting them all together. The first idea was to simply dry fit the shapes and see what looked nice.

The trouble with this approach is that the blocks are still quite fragile, and without gluing them together, they easily get knocked about and could get damaged if they were to fall over or drop on top of each other. What we needed was some way of making a "virtual dry fit" on the computer.

Incredibly, someone has spent a lot of time making Google Sketchup models for most of the Hirst Art moulds - at least, they have for the moulds we have got here. And the latest version of Ketchup (currently GS2014) has the model warehouse and extensions manager built right into it. So after downloading and installing the free version, it took no time at all to type "Hirst xxx" (where xxx is the mould number we have) and download a whole heap of ready-made 3d models for test-fitting.

We even downloaded a few 3d models of moulds we don't have, to help with the layout. For example, mould #270 is one for making floor blocks, for your tabletop terrain. Since we're going to be placing our models directly onto our electronic board game surface, and don't want to introduce any extra distance between the sensors and the playing pieces, we're not using these blocks - but the 3d models are useful for helping get everything lined up nicely.

Maybe we're just not used to the tools in Sketchup, but getting things to line up using the (rather crude) rotate and translate (move) tools can be quite tricky. Luckily, there's a number of extensions available, which allow you to align objects in your 3d drawing. We just searched the extension manager for "align" and installed the first one that came up - it works well enough and is easy enough to use to enable us to create a 6x8 grid from the 1" blocks in just a few minutes.

Getting useable models from the pieces of blocks was a little more involved, but after about an hour of wrestling with the Sketchup interface, we had a few wall sections ready to copy-and-paste into a board game layout. Here's an example of how the pieces from mould #301 fit together to make wall sections.

All this means we should be able to make up virtual examples of the room sections and extra industrial terrain for our spaceship-based game, without losing, breaking or damaging any of our recently cast pieces. The idea being, of course, that once we've dry-fit the pieces to make our board game sections, and got familiar with which pieces go where, actually constructing the real things should be that little bit easier!

Casting miniature terrain with Hirst Art moulds and Plaster of Paris

When I was about 8 years old, my sisters and I would cast characters from 70s kids shows in Plaster of Paris. Years later, after I'd left home and was struggling to make ends meet, I used to make chess sets from dental plaster, paint them up, and sell them to tourists through a local shop window. I never dreamt then that a lifetime later (yikes, it literally has been over a lifetime later) I'd be mixing up white gloopy gunk and pouring it into little rubber moulds again!

As work continues with our electronic board game, we're starting to think about adding terrain and feature to demonstrate what can really be done with this system - we're pretty fired up about it; maybe it will change the way people play tabletop board games - but first we need to show what's possible. And nothing gets people interested better than an amazing looking set-up.

In fact, that's what drew us at first to the Hirst Arts moulds.

They're not cheap. They require a lot of work (and a lot of multiple casting) and even when you get everything made up, it still needs painting, shading, highlighting and all that. But as miniature board game terrain it looks pretty impressive. And we want our electronic board game to look impressive too.

A lot of people use the "classic" Space Hulk style of board game layout, and moulds to go with it:

In fact, we did the same with our earlier versions of the electronic board game

Some nice industrial edging would finish those board sections off a treat! But then we decided to stick to the original design, and to make a generic, rectangular-section-based gaming system. Which meant that layouts like this...

would eventually need to look more like this:

However, there's something quite appealing about a board layout with no gaps. Somehow it looks more "complete" - more like a claustrophobic sci-fi/spaceship environment. And the photo above is very reminiscent of the early version of Laser Squad (the game upon which we tried to base our own shooting-in-a-spaceship board game Starship Raiders).

We clubbed together and bought a couple of moulds from the Hirst Arts UK reseller - we went for number #301 and #320. We also got some dental plaster off eBay but because the moulds arrived before the plaster, we went to a local art shop and bought some Plaster of Paris, just to try them out.

Making up the models turned out to be quite fun. It was like being nine years old, all over again!

After receiving the moulds, the powder inside them was washed out thoroughly with washing-up liquid and a good blast of hot water. The Plaster of Paris was mixed up to a thick batter-like consistency.

We placed the mould onto a newspaper on top of a "lap tray" (one of those things with a bean bag on the underside that stops your dinner sliding about on your knee while you eat in front of the telly!). While pouring the plaster into the mould, we banged the tray, to help release any air bubbles trapped in the plaster.

After about five minutes or so, the plaster started to go like a toothpaste consistency. At this point we were supposed to scrape the top of the moulds with a paint scraper or palette knife.

Unfortunately, we forgot this bit, and as soon as the plaster was poured, we went out for some dinner and forgot all about them!

A few hours later and the plaster had set (at least, set well enough for us to turn the pieces out). The pieces came out really easily. Simply flex the mould back and lift out where each piece starts to come free of the mould.

For a first casting, the results were OK. Well, ok-ish.
The detail from the moulds came out nicely on the pieces - even the tiny mesh pattern on a grate covering came out quite sharply. But every piece had air bubbles cast into it somewhere.

The instructions said that the quality improves after the first few castings, so it seems that we shouldn't expect our first set to be flawless after all. Also, given we forgot to scrape the top of the mould, none of the pieces sit together nicely - the bases (and sometimes the sides) are all uneven and would need a lot of work to make useable. We'll put this cast down to experience....

On the Hirst Arts US website, under "advanced techniques" (which we ignored, since we classed ourselves quite firmly as "beginner") it mentions "wet water". This is simply water with an additive which breaks the surface tension. We tried the test they demonstrated - firstly, placing a drop of water onto the back of one of the moulds.

The water stayed in a firm, rounded bubble shape.
So we coated the rubber mould with some water mixed with about a tablespoon or more full of dishwasher rinse aid (the stuff that supposedly stops your glass from going streaky). The result was quite noticeable

This time the water ran and dribbled everywhere, uncontrollably. It seems that wet water does make quite a difference to how a liquid performs in the silicone rubber moulds. So we turned the moulds over, filled with the "wet water" solution, eased out any bubbles that formed - using a small paintbrush - and tried again.

This time the results were noticeably better. Compare the two castings above (the first ones are on the left, the second castings on the right).

In this photo (above) the later casting is on the left. The second castings were much better. Not completely perfect - a few of the tiny details still had pin-prick sized holes - but at least gave us some useable pieces, at least good enough to try painting up.

The downside to Plaster of Paris is that it makes quite fragile pieces (dental plaster, apparently, makes much more robust casts) but also the rather "loose" mixture we made (roughly 50/50 water to plaster) means these casts are likely to take a day or two to dry out fully. While they're set hard enough to be taken out of the moulds, they still feel cold and clammy to touch. Which suggests that they wouldn't take paint very well just now.

Luckily we're coming into the start of summer here on the south coast - maybe a few hours in the baking hot sun will help get them ready to paint, sometime tomorrow?