So Brendan is planning on building a diorama board for when we hopefully will show off the game at upcoming conventions in style. As part of the plan, he needed to get the basic supplies to put the board together, so we decided to do a trip to Lowe’s.

Well, because nothing in life is easy, this happened:

Apparently he was trying to be Alex Honnold and failed…

Anyway, this complicated things a little bit, as he had to scoot down 2 flights of stairs and crutch up a hill to get to my car to drive to Lowes (yeah, my bountiful experience using crutches after my foot surgery last year came in super handy coaching him how to get around and in/out of the car :P)

After getting to the store, a miracle happened and we found this!

Granted, it was slow and made an ear-piercing beeping noise when backing up, it was still better than him having to crutch around the massive hardware store all night!

Anyway, long story short, we ran around the stor for an hour looking for things and asking for help that never showed up. Finally, after we managed to get some hardware and the basic foam board, we realized that there’s no way that foam board would fit in the car. After asking the cashier, he recommended we buy a razor to cut the foam outside in the parking garage to make it fit.

The one time Brendan didn’t bring his pocket knife was that night. :( So we looked for the cheapest razor we could find, and just before we were walking out, Brendan saw an even cheaper one (by $2). Being the fiscally responsible game designers that we are, we grabbed this instead!

After paying for everything just before Lowe’s closed, I started cutting the foam board outside, using a crutch as a straight-edge.

About halfway through, disaster struck, and the razor broke off. Hmm, weird, that was fragile. Maybe I was cutting too hard. So I used the remaining bits to slowly cut through the rest of the foam. After the first piece was done (the left side from my point of view), the last bit of the razor broke too. We were SOL without a knife at that point.

As Brendan started cutting the next piece with his keys, one of the Lowe’s workers whom we spoke with earlier in the store saved us by lending us his super cool “credit card wallet pocket knife”. After thanking him profusely, we were able to cut the board into small enough pieces to fit the car and get it home.

Once we got back, we took a better look at the razor that was a POS, and realized it wasn’t a razor at all…

It was a “carpenter’s pencil”…

WTF?! Why the hell would they make a pencil like this??? And how the heck did I cut through all that foam with a PENCIL?! Well, I can put that on my resume now. Who needs a razor if you have a pencil? ;-)

Anyway, now that we have the basic materials, hopefully we’ll be able to share the progress of the diorama in the near future!

What do you think? What cuts better? Pencil? Keys? or something else?

Building a Diorama - Part 2