Board Game Designers Forum

Look like a nice set of templates for card setup.

I have a few questions:
Do you allow for importing of text from cards using the tool?
Does it allow you to set custom sizes for the final cards?
Does it setup entire pages for printing, or is it more for individual cards?

Do you mean automatic creation of a large number of cards based on some text file? This design kit is a Adobe Photoshop graphic file and set of layer styles, so you have to create each individual card. Of course if you create a design for a card you can add text for each of them as a separate text layer to export them individually.

It's possible to automate the process but it involves creating a custom script using Photoshop API (available in 3 languages, e.g. JavaScript) to put the texts from an external file. API documentation for Photoshop CS6 is available here.

Size of cards is set to dimensions described in the item details page, but of course it's possible to change them. If you only want to resize the cards keeping the aspect ratio you can prepare them in original size and then resize the whole file. You can also resize the file before designing and then add text and other stuff. In this case some layer style scaling (one of Photoshop options) could be helpful. If you want to create a card of different size and aspect ratio yo have to do some more work with background layers and layouts - it's not hard, but some knowledge of Photoshop would be helpful.

The file itself is prepared for a design of individual cards. When you have your cards designed you can export them e.g. as JPEG or TIFF images and prepare a large file for print of multiple cards. I didn't prepared multi-card file due to PSD file size and performance reasons (large number of cards with several styled layers could be a hard stuff for some machines - rasterized and flattened final JPEGs or TIFFs are better in such cases). Another problem is the paper format - each person may want another size (different for US or European ISO standards) so it's hard to fit everyone's needs.

Another solution for importing data from text files are layer variables. In Photoshop you can create a text layer and associate a variable with it. It's possible to load a data file in specific format, that will generate data sets. With data sets it's possible to change card's contents quickly. Some examples are available in this article.

These questions made me think for a while about some improvements I can make in this design kit. What kind of automated features would be nice? What do you think?

Ideas I have now:

• script (with dialog box, file chooser etc.) to load a data file (e.g. CSV or other specific format) - also available in a way I described above,
• script (also with configurable settings as paper size, rows, columns, space between and so on) to create a grid-based layout for printing more than one card on a page.

What other features would be helpful in such kind of design kit?

I can safely say if those two features existed in your product I would buy it now.

For the moment, I am using "MSE Set Editor" which has a lot of useful functions for prototyping, and it may be worthwhile to download that and play with it some.

One useful feature it has is linking text descriptions to card abilities, for instance, "Rarity" can have icons assigned to is, and when someone is listed as "rare" in a file a certain symbol of a certain color is applied. Setting these graphical type variables is a nice advanced feature as many card and board games share many of the same icons, and being able to change an icon 1 place and have all cards update saves a ton of time.

I'll think about some kind of solution to achieve something like this.

It's also possible to do so with data sets I've described earlier. You can create layers with all icons, badges and all the stuff and with data set variable you can control visibility of there layers.

Some example:

1. You can create e.g. 5 different card designs (background, color, etc.) and save them as flattened layers (for performance reasons) in a new file.
2. Add icons, badges, text layers etc.
3. Define variables for visibility of each layer as described in article posted earlier.
4. Create a CSV file (e.g. in MS Excel) with each variable defined.
5. Load the file as data set and proceed as described in the article.

One disadvantage of this solution is that you have to create separate variables for each layer and in the data file there can be really large number of columns (5 backgrounds = 5 variables and only one of them set to "visible" in each data row - it would be better if there was only one variable with layer name to show).

You have to remember that Photoshop is software for graphic manipulation, so some features can be hard or even impossible to implement.

I'll not have free time to play with Photoshop scripts until end of July or even later, so I can't promise anything now, but the idea is very interesting and I'm curious how it do it and how it will work.

Thanks for the idea and inspiration :)

If I understand the License correctly, I would need to buy the art again for each game I produce. I refer to:

Is this correct?

To be honest some license aspects of Envato Marketplaces (such as Graphicriver) are not clear even for authors. I think your interpretation is correct (when we talk about regular, not extended license which is applicable when you're going to publish and sell the final game), but the best way to be sure is to contact Envato support (unfortunately sometimes they respond after quite long time, e.g. 5-7 days).

When you plan to publish and sell the game or other products based on the Envato Marketplaces items I think the best way is to try and prepare everything under regular license (which is quite inexpensive when you consider the authors work and time spent on the item's creation and the fact that the authors get about 50% of the sales value) and then, if the final result is good and the product is ready for sale, get the extended license.

I just purchased and downloaded your Game Cards Design Kit but when I tried to open it up, it wouldn't open. I have an old version of Photoshop (Photoshop 6). Apparently, my version is incompatible with the Design Kit. Do you know if there is a work-around? I'm pretty bummed to have purchased something so cool and yet not be able to use it. Is there a way to get a version saved as a Photoshop 6 file? I would even take separate PNGs or JPGs to use as guides, as I'm mostly interested in the layouts and not so much the textures. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks for the purchase and for the information about the issue.

Minimum Photoshop version is Photoshop CS (8.0) - that information is on the item description on Graphicriver, but I've sent you a message with some detailed questions. I hope I'll be able to help you with that.