For my final project, I made a functional connect-four game. The yellow game piece comes off and slides into the bottom base for easy and flat storage. The game pieces can be divided into the base so two players can easily play.
This was difficult to print because the game pieces had to be exactly the correct width and thickness in order to slide in the game correctly. If the pieces were too thick they would get stuck in the game. If they were too thin, the pieces would overlap and make the game unplayable.
The base also had to be the correct size or else the game would fall over and not stay up.
In order to ensure all the pieces of the game were the correct size, I printed each piece at 0.06 thickness. This took FOREVER considering that I had to print each element of the game 5 times or more the get them perfect.
The Process:
I started out by printing miniature versions of what I wanted, in order to get the spacing and make sure the design worked appropriately.
Sometimes the pieces would get stuck in the container
Or the pieces would overlap
But I kept adjusting the piece by 1mm until it was neither too tight nor too loose so the pieces worked perfectly.
Now it was time to print it bigger and in nice colors.
The Yellow panel luckily only took one print to get right. I was nervous about it being too tall and falling over so I lowered halved the speed of the printer. I don’t know if lowering the speed actually would prevent tall pieces from getting messed up, but I didn’t want to print it multiple times, so I played it safe.
The Base took 2 times to print. The first time I made the hole for the stand too big, so it would fall over
The Second one worked great
Now To print all of the game disks.
This was a bit tricky because although the smaller model had working disks, I had to use a different printer for the different colors. so the disks were slightly different in size. To print the disks I adjusted the size of the disks .1 mm at a time until they didn’t overlap on me.
Then it finally worked.
