When I began to develop an interest in working in the gaming area, I found that I should settle on a nickname that I would go by on Discord and other relevant platforms. I wanted to use a name different from what I used in my private and not so anonymous life for years and after one or two iterations I came up with the name Wild Rikku, usually written as WildRikku. It is a reference to wild Pokémon and the character Rikku from Final Fantasy X and X-2.
After a while, I found that the name was a good choice. It was unique enough to be recognized, was not used on any platform I use or plan to use in the future, it refered to someone I can identify with and it did not raise too many questions. It's a girl's name, but I don't mind that and so far people did not care. Soon enough, I figured it would be fun if I had an accessoire related to the character I named myself after. I needed a scarf, so I decided it should be Rikku's iconic scarf from Final Fantasy X-2.
The story how I began to learn how to knit to make that scarf is one I might tell later. As scarfs can only be worn in winter (well, at least it's a burden in summer and I have limits), I wondered if I could make Rikku's daggers, too. I am okay in woodworking after all. Unfortunately the daggers turned out to have weird angles I don't really have an idea how to reproduce, so I postponed that.
Meanwhile, I started playing Final Fantasy XIII. Yeah, I know, I'm really late. That game is enough for another post but what's important is that the main character, or rather the one I like most, Lightning, has an iconic weapon, a sword that can transform into a gun, often refered to as a gunblade. Well, that would make a cool prop! It's absurd 101 cm long, but a lot of people made one already and so images and even sketches almost as detailed as an actual plan were available. My visual thinking is really, really bad and also I cannot imagine things I saw before in my head, so plan-like images are necessary whenever I want to make something that already exists.
Well... it escalated quickly. The gunblade turned out to consist of rather simple parts. For my woodworking, I always wanted to turn my reciprocating saw into a bandsaw-like machine by turning it upside down and screwing it to a table. That would be the tool of choice when making something with rather complex forms (read: forms more complex than a tri- or rectangle) from wood. So I did that and tried it out with a 1:2 scale printout of the gunblade's base glued to a leftover piece of wood. It worked out surprisingly well. The fun thing that also lead to the title of this text is that I used to take woodworking classes as a kid and also sometimes made wood versions of items from video games. I tend to attribute my woodworking hobby to the pandemic but that's actually not true.
After testing the handling of the wood prototype with some weight attached to make it roughly the weight it would actually be, I made 1:1 scale printouts and a cardboard model. That worked pretty well, too (after figuring out how to print in true scale), and surprisingly, I found it quite satisfying to cut out the pieces and figure out which one belongs where. I was not satisfied with the idea of assembling them though. The positions of the parts in the middle do not really make sense. They match how it looks in the game and the official artworks but it just feels wrong to have them floating around. In the build I initially intended to copy they are attached to a base (which I made the wood prototype of) but that base does not actually exist in the original gunblade, the person who made the plans needed it to forge an actual sword. So I had to figure out how the transformation to a gun works, surely there must be more parts involved that were missing in my plans. Thanks to nice people posting cool stuff on the internet I found a series of images that show the transformation and apparently are pretty accurate. Unfortunately, what happens in the game is physically impossible. There are people on Youtube who built a transformable gunblade though, so I decided that I need a 3D model in CAD and began to learn Fusion 360.
- to be continued -
--
Du möchtest etwas zu diesem Artikel sagen? Schreib mir auf Twitter @Konzertheld, auf Mastodon @WildRikku@mastodon.gamedev.place oder einfach eine Mail an blog [at] konzertheld.de!