WTactics

- open source strategy ccg

Posts Tagged card template

template design rationale

Jul 27

Posted by snowdrop in General, ORC | 12 Comments

This is a long and hopefully interesting post for anyone that want’s to get an in-depth look in what’s going on in my mind and in my layout experiments. I’ve divided it into two separate sections for your reading pleasure – one about the logo dev, and another about how one should place containers and display card costs on a template.

The logo stuff

First I’d like to present the Rebel & Merfolk logos – the only two faction symbols that are actually completed at this stage.

Most of you are already acquainted with the Elf-leaf I whooped up for the Rebels, but have probably not seen it in all it’s zoomed in glory. While seeing logos zoomed in will be extremely rare in a CCG on the cards themselves, it is still a bonus if the logo still looks good when it is enlarged. I think these ones both do, and they don’t seem to need much extra work put on them when showing them off on posters etc.

Read the rest of this entry »

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a new tool & test prints

May 10

Posted by snowdrop in General, ORC | No Comments

Time came for me to check out some test prints of both the creature and event card templates. In reality it’s not really a conventional printer that will do the work. Instead, I have sent them in to a photo lab, where the “test prints” will be developed as digital photographies on high quality matte photo paper.

While playing around with the templates in Inkscape to prepare a couple of test cases for the digital photo lab I discovered that Inkscape couldn’t do a bitmap export of them in a format that the photo lab supported.

At that point I could just have used GIMP or any other editor to open and re-save the PNG-images from the Inkscape export into whatever format I wanted, but I chose a different path since that would have to be done to over 20 images, one by one (if one doesn’t know the delicate secrets of the terminal in combo with GIMP ;) )

Thus, I started my quest for a user friendly – yet powerful – open source solution for easy batch processing of image files. Thanks to durand I found out about a powerful and flexible easy to use piece of software that met all of my criteria: Phatch.

For anyone that craves after a nice GUI and powerful batch operations, this program would be it. And trust me, when developing a CCG it will likely come to good use plenty of times as having to deal with 200 – 300 cards is really something that should be handled by batch processing and nothing else.

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