Series One ~
This started off as a very basic attempt to have a few weapon designs based around firearms, I set about drawing a gun in 6 different parts, each part having 4 variations.
Following this I put them in order and began to ask people for a 6 digit number using only the numbers between 1 - 4. Obviously this was all I could really do for this preliminary test as I'd not drawn enough variations to accommodate more but this was just a test. I made up a few designs using the combinations of digits I was given (given that the other people didn't know what the numbers meant) and this was the result, the weapons made with the numbers provided (and shown)
From this early test of the concept I was trying to work with I was actually impressed with the results I'd gotten from quite varied parts that I'd just drawn up without giving any of them much thought (my favourite by far is the last one). It was still clear that a lot of this would need tweaks regarding using parts that would integrate together more smoothly (the lever action handle on this first test doesn't seem to fit any too well), however this was a good initial concept.
This is the general overview of series one as a closed project, the weapon parts shown in their different types and in order of their use given the six-digit code as well as a few of the earlier examples.
Series 2 ~
After my first venture into this concept of design I was trying to develop I moved onto a more in depth study of the idea using something a little different this time (to move away from the very Borderlands style that I'd gone with before as a test). This time I was planning to work with melee weapons in a kind of RPG style, I was keen to try and create ten variations of however many parts I was working with so that however many parts given every weapon could be produced with a number of the amount of digits of parts created. I was also keen to incorporate colour into this test aswell as I'd always had some problems with getting colour into my designs properly as I've mentioned in other entries here. I also planned to create a naming system so that all weapons generated under this scheme would be coloured and also have a name specific to their design.
The first step in creating all these was to decide on the number of parts, given that I wasn't aiming for a specific type of weapon (an idea I plan to come back to later), I decided to do melee weapons that could cover a few variations so I used four parts at first that would each have ten variations which would give me a starting number of what seemed like a massive 10000 combinations of weapons exactly (9999 being all possible numbers but including 0000). I thought this was ridiculous after working drawing up my original sheet of designs as that seemed wrong but it turned out that just drawing those 40 weapon parts that was indeed the amount I'd created.
Below is the first series of weapon parts, each part has been given a name and the order in which a weapon is named is noted at the top of the image. Ignore the little blue numbers for now.
From these parts any number between 0000 and 9999 will generate a unique weapon with it's own name, below are some examples of numbers I was given and generated the following weapons with their given names generated by the code '431 of 2', this being the order that a weapon is named, basically it is the Base - Handle - WeapEnd of Hilt (e.g Plain Royal Edge of Honour - 1111)
I'd noticed that in some other examples some of my earlier designs made some generations seem badly made as the actual 'Weap-end' of the weapon seemed dwarfed by combinations of hilt, handle and base (the names given to the other parts).
Quite visible in the first example on the left, even when I tried to stretch the image of the blade it still looks tiny on the rest of the hilt of the weapon making it look slightly wrong. Originally I tried to overlook it though I would come back to this issue later in this test.
Going back to the last of the good examples I'd like to draw attention to the fact that once again all the parts I'd drawn had no planned pairings with any other part that I'd drawn, so naturally every so often one weapon generated randomly seemed to come out horribly well. My favourite by far (of the ones I actually generated) is the 1552 'State Reclaimed Edge of The Ship'. This was made from a number given to me by someone else who couldn't see the parts and I absolutely love that this thing came out of the random assortment of parts that I'd created and would become the example for further studies throughout this test.
After putting the weapon size issue to one side for the moment I went back to look at colouring of these weapons and for this I had to come up with a series of colour schemes and a pallet to represent all these. Taking another piece of inspiration from Borderlands (that I'd later expand on) I also gave these colour schemes a little logo that could be put next to a name so that it could instantly be recognisable which theme they used.
As we can see this section of the test was rushed a little but I knew that I'd planned to do a more detailed and clean version later on. Here we have a series of five different colour schemes (each column being numbered for it's theme reference) with their logos at the top, each logo is coloured by it's respective theme. Now we can go back to look at the little blue numbers on my original weapon part list.
These blue numbers refer to how it will be coloured based on the theme, not shown clearly on the colour pallet but the numbered colour at the top is colour 1 of that theme, then 2, 3 and 4 respectively going downwards. I decided to test these out first by applying them to the 1552, the State Reclaimed Edge of The Ship (Come on how good did that name come out?). Below is each individual colour sceme applied to the 1552.
It was my intention to try and give each colour scheme a particular point of contrast (being colour 4 in all examples), note that in the weapon part sheet the number 4 comes up very rarely compared to the more standard 1, 2 and 3 colours. This was done on purpose to try and add a sense of rarity to certain weapon parts to make them seem more special, which could then be developed as an idea into an actual game. After this I looked into a few different examples to see if the decent standard went across other random creations. (I'm aware that the first 2 are the same theme but these came from other people and it just happened to go this way.)
After contemplating these results I realised I now had 5 sets of 10000 combinations so essentially now had 50000 different weapons, however I wasn't satisfied with some of my colour themes and the quality of some of the weapons that were coming out seemed to need work. I debating ending series 2 here because I'd worked out quite a lot more on the basis of this method of design but I wasn't happy leaving it like this, I was determined to develop the idea even further to have an even better sense of this concept.
Given that each of the weapon parts looks fairly sketchy and some of the designs and names just don't seem to work I set about recreating them all as a more high definition image with some better names and designs for some of them, after a little work on this I had a much larger resolution sheet of better parts to now create with.
By comparison some of the designs have been changed completely and all of them had been developed into something that looks a lot neater. Once again all the blue numbers refer to how each part will be developed. Knowing that all of these would work as examples fine already I went ahead with creating a new set of colour schemes to accommodate the higher detail of this new set.
Taking some of the earlier themes into account and remaking them a little nice I then went on to develop enough to have a total of 10 different colour themes. While creating these I was talking a little with my brother, (who had been helping by giving me random numbers for some of the earlier designs), as I'd not always been amazing at coming up with ways of colouring things I asked his assistance and he created two of the following themes (5 and 6). Also notice that themes 1, 2 and 3 are almost the same as my first 3 colour schemes from before.
After designing the new colour pallet I wanted to expand upon the 'logo' idea that I'd used previously, taking yet another idea from the Borderlands weapon system I decided to not only give each theme a logo but a name aswell (as in the companies on Borderlands), taking some time to try and give each theme it's own character as when designing the themes I often had things in mind. Theme 1 was supposed to be kind of air and wind based, theme 2 is like underground with rock (the brown) and then metal ores (the grey) and even lava at the bottom. Theme 8 was a natural wood type look, theme 0 was supposed to be kind of magical. I tried to make each logo and theme reflect each other so as to create a sense of what type of weapon it might function as perhaps elementally (Theme 2 being Fire perhaps, theme 8 being something organic).
Here is the pallet of the colours shown individually (as it's sort of hard to see them properly being thrown together in a grid like they are above), and their respective named logos.
Now that I had another 'part' as such it now meant I could generate weapons based on a five-digit number instead extending my variations up to 100,000. (Eeep!) I then went ahead to ask people for some random 5 digit numbers to give me some final examples of this part of the test around Series 2 and I was very happy to have put extra time into making it much neater and appealing. Here are some of my final examples with their colours and names as well as their generation number,
I'm really interested in working on some more different series of this type of design concept using more than just weaponry, ideally I'd like to make it so that I'd have a concept of all manner of things that could be applied in a game (most likely RPG) because I'd been thinking that there was no reason that the same idea couldn't be applied to clothing, armour, people, creatures (and therefore enemies), even buildings and landscapes perhaps. All of these things together would create a ridiculous amount of variation to a game environment that I think is being missed out at the moment and I'd be really interested in putting an idea like this into something that I helped to create. The next series I'd like to do on this would be armour. I also plan to go back and create many more series of weapons in which the style of weapon is specified in the generation code aswell (for example the first digit referring to whether the weapon was a dagger, sword, axe, hammer etc.). I have a list of different classes that I'd like to experiment with in future.
Just to finish off here's the 15524, the State Reclaimed Edge of The Ship by Lagoon.
More to come on this concept, much love for reading this far heh I know I've gone on and on but I appreciate it a lot, any feedback or input is welcome <3
~ZH
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