Prototyping a product for the first time exposed how little I actually knew. I didn’t understand the materials. I didn’t understand the equipment. I didn’t know how to use the software. I didn’t know how to put together a viable schematic or design diagram. But understanding what you don’t know is the starting point of all progress. You can’t get better until you know what needs improvement.
Each of the aforementioned deficiencies were reflected in the prototype. It was decent to look at and received many compliments, but when the time came to play the game, it hardly played. The sizing of various parts was off, and the general design was inherently flawed because it was simply too complex. When playing the game and the current round comes to an end, everyone has to take stock of what they control. Looking at the boards to discern the status of the game was not easy or intuitive. Can you make sense of the image below? Don’t worry, neither could anyone else!
The lopsided design made it painfully cumbersome to do simple calculations. The game itself already takes some time, and so it was frustrating to have the experience further delayed by something so trivial. Changes needed to be made. But before I could do a serious redesign, I needed to upgrade my Illustrator skills. And with that, in January 2017, I went through another training program, much like the one I had done for 3D modeling a couple months earlier. The focus of this program was Adobe Illustrator. I spent five weeks grinding through it, and I’m grateful I did. It opened the door to a whole new world of possibility.
This was what I started with before I knew how to do anything or use the software:
This is what I ended up with after a little training and much practice:
What’s more is that the skills I’d begun to cultivate were in fact complementary. I didn’t know that would be the case, but instead discovered it by accident. Sculpting raw space into coherent models in a 3D program like Blender, can be a bid tedious and awkward. But as it turns out, you can import images directly from programs like Illustrator and model off of them directly in Blender. That is how the image below - what I’ve come to regard as the official Frenemies logo and trademark - was born. 6 months ago, I never would have been able to conceive of producing something like this. Now it’s easy.
Experimenting in Illustrator:
After a little work and tweaking of the design, porting over in to Blender gave me this:
