Designing the Idol!

When designing the Idol for Yeti Mountain, my first thought was to make the Idol a card and not a physical playing piece. This would help reduce the creation cost of the game significantly because it would require one less injection mold(about $2,500+) and no plastic to create.

Here is a picture of what the playing card idol was going to look like:

After pondering, and discussing with a few other people, the idea of having a playing card, instead of a playing piece, just didn't seem as fun. Also, unlike before, I am now going to produce the injection molds myself, using a CNC machine, which should reduce the creation cost of the game drastically. I also bought an injection molding machine recently which I will use to manufacture, not only the idol, but all of the playing pieces for the game.

I used Autodesk Maya to design a 3d Idol that I will use to create an injection mold:

I then 3D printed out various versions of the Idol to see what it was like as a physical object:

Another advantage to having a physical idol, is that I can easily integrate it with the other playing pieces. I have some small edits left to do to the marble launcher, but the Idol sits on top of the launcher with the Yeti:

I haven't created any of the injection molds yet, but my goal is to start producing them once the final prototype board has arrived!

If you have any questions on some of the specifics, please ask and I will try my best to answer them!
If you have any feedback on how I could have improved the design or the overall process, I would love to hear it!

Thanks,
Marlon :)

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