Creating custom figurines based on existing ones?

I think what you want is a miniatures sculptor. If you go to the Art and Graphic Design Facebook group or the Art and Graphic Design Forums on Boardgamegeek and search "Sculptor" you can likely find some. If they are a digital sculptor, typically they'll provide you with a 3D printable file + the digital master that you can later work with a manufacturer on producing. Many manufacturers will also often sculpting services in addition to manufacturing services – though usually you'll be hiring a 2D artist to provide them concept art to work from.

This is based off the assumption you are trying to self-publish via kickstarter or similar as indicated in your other post. If you are thinking you might try to pitch publishers, I can provide different advice. Something to note is that while there are plenty of places to find miniatures sculptors, designing for production is an expensive process. You can 3D print some early models, but you'll need to work with a sculptor who has designed specifically for casting models before (note also different materials have different casting requirements). I personally don't think prototyping miniatures is worth the spend until you are pretty much all the way done with the game, but your mileage may vary. Just be aware that you could potentially be spending a LOT of money. I briefly read through your other post and your current design is EXTREMELY costly to produce, so you'll need a relatively high minimum run just to break even, especially given art costs. As such – I'd be very cautious about spending too much money prototyping.

Using minis from other games is totally fine for playtesting – and I'm not clear where you are in the process of design for 12 towers. I would recommend not producing any miniatures until you are 100% sure you are going to launch the game commercially, and do it at the same time you are commissioning your other art and final graphic design (maybe with a slightly longer lead time)

If you want to start doing promotional shots with all components that are unique to your game, you can make standees with 2D art or public domain art at a much lower (or zero) budget, or use generic colored pawns. This is what I've done for a miniatures game I'm planning pitching to publishers this August.

TLDR: Getting miniatures produced is quite expensive and probably isn't necessary until you are extremely close to launch on kickstarter

Anyway, hope that is helpful – happy to chat if you have questions.

It is possible to make a mold that makes distinct figurines, though as far as I know all of the pieces in the same mold need to be the same color.

If all of these figures were the same material (e.g., pewter), you could potentially make one mold of a whole set. But if the plan is to do injection-molded plastic in 12 colors, then you need 12 molds that make several copies each., making your minimum number of sets 40,000 to 120,000!. This is mitigated a bit if there are other pieces in player colors, maybe getting you all the way down to a 10,000 minimum again (but still with the upfront cost of 12 molds and all of the original sculptures).

the colored bases is smart - we came to the same conclusion for Knossus after discussing with a manufacturer. To do different colours, you're looking at minimum runs in each color (you can't mix in a single run but you can use the same mould)

another consideration is that you need a sculptor who knows what they are doing -
which is what John's alluding to - a single miniature might need to be made in multiple pieces due to undercuts, which increases mould costs.

One more is that you might even need different moulds for different figures - its possible to combine them into one mould but if you have significantly different sizes then the injection process doesn't work so you might end up paying the mould cost multiple times (and it looks like minimum 3-4 moulds from your list of figures required)

personally - I'd go with meeples unless you are feeling a burning desire to spend money :) (please note I'm not smart enough to take my own advice - but I have signicantly less figures for my own game!)

realised what I'd written was a bit confusing - now corrected :)

Point is that you might need 500 figures of each color for your game, for lets say 6000 in total (print run of 500). You might find there's a minimum run of 1000 figures so your cost is double what you'd expect it to be (1000 x 12 = 12000 figures)

It's fairly standard to have minimum runs of casting. This is also true in boardgame manufacturers from the conversations I've had where they've looked for minimum runs of 1000.

By the way, it's hard to pick a dozen colors that all stay visually distinct... and you did a really good job of it.

I usually refer to this paper that goes into ludicrous detail about picking colors. Figure 2 is the generic recommendation that designers have had since the 1960's (with only the first 9 suitable for color-blind viewers), and Figure 4 gives a somewhat expanded palette.

Call the light blue "azure" and all 12 of your colors are there.

For my own game, I wanted to avoid using any two adjacent colors on that figure, but that was a little too limiting. Now I'm at least trying to keep the adjacent colors to just diagonals.

You can fit 12 human-sized models into 2 molds.
For example, Guards of Atlantis had 17 different sculpts, two of which were rather large.
It required 3 molds.

There's no need for a separate mold for bases either.

Longpack were pretty explicit when I asked them this - and then a couple of other people nodded sagely and agreed afterwards when I mentioned it.. :)

I thought CMON minis tended to have integral bases rather than seperate though?
If thats what you mean then no issue at all - its if the base is seperate from the mini (which I am currently considering)