It turned out a lot better than expected. The class pretty much got wooed by the pretty and professional-looking cards. It felt like a Christmas party when we received the cards we order!
Design
Daniel Solis's 5 GRAPHIC DESIGN AND TYPOGRAPHY TIPS FOR YOUR CARD GAME is my constant guideline to refer back to. Some good points he brought up that is exclusive to card game design are:- Graphical elements to distinguish cards are much better than mere words.
- Keep the texts short and precise; no player would want to wait for the others to finish reading.
- When it comes to font size, consider the distance between players and cards. If something need to be read by all players across the table, it probably needs to be big. If it's just flavor text, keep it small and separate.
Our game is We Are Alone, a post-apocalyptic exploration combat card game where the cards make the board.
- Theme: In a world where human were gone, the other creatures start reclaim the earth.
- Some requirements: 4 types of deck, each for one player and each resembling a race.
- Races inspiration: Distinct color schemes, different elements and the terrains they can relate to, mythological creatures.
Back of the Card
Treeple
- Based off Alex Pardee's Treeple, and Ent in the legends. Holds the holy mission to reclaim the damaged environment.
Shapeshifter
- Based off swamp monster, salamander and Man-Thing from Marvel. Sneaky amoral creature that moves in the shadow. Writes scary diaries where he refers the diary as another person.
Prometheans
- This one started as Phoenix, but we changed the concept because phoenix is a deity-like singular creature, and it was hard to come up with lores and monsters for it.
- The lore's goal is to have some thief and rogue cultured race in the game, to contrast with the other races. The Prometheans are thieving creatures seeking the warmth of the flame and the last ember the phoenix carries that would lit the Great Fires that burns across the world once more.
Depthling
- The explorer race. Depthlings are humanoids from the deep sea, exploring the land in their "aqua-suits". The lore was interesting because it was written from the perspective of Depthlings, who considers lakes island, water breathable, and air suffocating.
Front of the Card
The color shows the faction; the side bar shows the type; the title is, well, title. There's a paragraph of descriptions about how this card works, and at the bottom we put in some witty flavor texts.
Lore Card
One thing that makes this game unique is the adventure mode: Player can choose to read lore cards after their first, second, third, and final battle, depending on the outcome of the battle.
Production
Each deck has 52 cards, and all the cards need art. That's a lotta art.
Drawing takes a lot more time, and since none of us (including me!) are really artists, we decided to find creative common licensed pictures and photoshop them to make them look like paintings. We split the works to four people. I made the template for each race, each type of cards, and we plug the art, description and flavor texts in.
printerstudio.com is where we print our cards. They have a card design template you can download, so that's pretty neato. When it comes to printing, the most important thing is to be aware of bleeding: the edge of the image will be cut off. The cards we submit all have border extending to the edge of the document, so that when the machine cuts it off it'll create the professional looking rounded edge. Regularly the printers are 300 dpi, and when that translates to Photoshop it becomes 300 pixel per inch. The color for printing is also different from the color on screen: CMYK instead of RGB. Generally, they look less vibrant when printed, because the screen emits light and the cards don't.
Drawing takes a lot more time, and since none of us (including me!) are really artists, we decided to find creative common licensed pictures and photoshop them to make them look like paintings. We split the works to four people. I made the template for each race, each type of cards, and we plug the art, description and flavor texts in.
printerstudio.com is where we print our cards. They have a card design template you can download, so that's pretty neato. When it comes to printing, the most important thing is to be aware of bleeding: the edge of the image will be cut off. The cards we submit all have border extending to the edge of the document, so that when the machine cuts it off it'll create the professional looking rounded edge. Regularly the printers are 300 dpi, and when that translates to Photoshop it becomes 300 pixel per inch. The color for printing is also different from the color on screen: CMYK instead of RGB. Generally, they look less vibrant when printed, because the screen emits light and the cards don't.
Post Mortem
"What? I thought this whole article is a post-mortem."
- Pickled Chickenfoot
- Lore Card Design: Looks pretty, but hard to categorize and order, and lore card happens to be the ones that need shuffling the most.
- Front card design: Pretty good. Card Type can use some less kerning. Since each types have different word length, it'll look better to line up the end of the word instead of the beginning, and have the first letter "hang" down there. Symbol would help distinguishing types of card a lot as well.
- Printing: As mentioned beforehand, the cards are generally darker than digital ones. Shapeshifter's texture is barely visible and Treeple's border is a lot darker than expected. I would recommend pre-printing the cards on thinner, cheaper paper, to preview the colors.
- Team Dynamics: The best way to communicate visual ideas is to present them. As a rogue designer that speaks another tone natively, things went a lot smoother when I started crunching out pixels. It's awkward to argue about the looks of a card when there is no card, especially if the other isn't a designer.
Oh, we also made boxes today. Hand crafted custom boxes.
BOXES!
Printer Studio dot com has box templates for 52 cards. That won't fit our 240 something cards - plus it's very expensive to order them, as they only produce custom boxes in large quantity - so we took their template, modified it to fit our cards, printed them at the RIT Printing hub, folded and glued them into boxes ourselves.
That's right, we are over-achievers.
The post-mortem for boxes would be to find some professional places that prints custom boxes in small amounts. Sure, hand-crafting everything gives a feeling of accomplishment, but it takes a lot of work to cut the boxes with scissor, fold them and glue them, and they will still be flawed when comparing to professional boxes. The 100lb paper I used is the heaviest paper in the printing hub, but the ink cracks wherever the paper is folded. Any suggestions on how this can be done?
Wanna try the game?
You can find us at RIT to play, ask Weez about her copy, or order copies from this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/VDCSMV7
We are working on printing the rules at the moment this blog is published. Along with the cost of boxes, I'm guesstimating $23 without the lore card, and $30 with them.
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