Variable Data in Card Game Design




I've certainly had an educational weekend. Right now I'm laying out three card games: Zeppelin Armada, Velociraptor! Cannibalism!, and Belle of the Ball. I'm kind of using Belle as a training ground to become a more efficient card game layout-er, 'cause damn that's actually a really a fun job.

What wasn't so fun was manually inserting every digit and icon directly into the layout. It was prone to typos, misalignments and subtle printing inconsistencies. I knew the big guys at WotC couldn't be setting up their Magic cards this way. Perhaps there's a way to automate this process?

I have some experience working with print houses who do what they call "variable data." It goes by several names, kind of like the Devil. Indeed, the central feature of variable data turns out to be spreadsheets. Not quite Lucifer, but close.

I followed Adobe's datamerge tutorial. I managed to figure it out thanks to several video tutorials that you can see at the top of this post. Each tutorial lacks in some areas, but others compensate. When you've watched them all, you get a real sense of how this can be used in card games.

For an example, check out this spreadsheet for Belle of the Ball. Some of the columns list plain text, others list .eps images that I call where necessary. These images are card icons generally, though the "PORTRAIT" column is where I'll call the portrait art. Now, I can set up one card template and be sure that all the icons, text, and art are in exactly the same positions.

Very powerful kung fu here, folks. Imagine you're making a card game like Magic: The Gathering. Your suits will have different backgrounds, each card has unique art, several cards have recurring icons in different amounts, and all have varying blocks of text. Using layers in InDesign, you can set aside spaces for all these elements without fear of them overlapping each other in unpredictable ways.

Set your background image block in a BACKGROUND layer in InDesign. Do the same for ART, ICONS, and TEXT in ascending order. Then you lay out your image and text frames as per the tutorials above. There you go, no fuss card game layout.

P.S. If you are making a game like Magic, and you'd rather show quantities as a row of individual icons instead of a single digit (like mana cost), there are two things you might do:

One, you can set aside several columns representing each potential space for mana cost icon. Then, insert the appropriate .eps as necessary. This may be tedious, but it's relatively straightforward.

Two, you can create a special font for ALL your game icons. Then, you don't have to call any special .eps files at all. You can just insert normal text into your spreadsheet, set the InDesign text styles to your special font, then voila! You have yourself a card game.

Comments

  1. JingsleyMay 7, 2012 at 9:07 AM

    It occurs to me that what you have been looking to achieve here is essentially the same process used to produce enterprise dashboards for reporting of business metrics. You might find dashboardspy.com is an interesting and useful starting point in providing examples of how people have turned spreadsheet numbers into visually attractive and useful information.

    ReplyDelete
  2. wobblesMay 7, 2012 at 9:57 AM

    This post is excellent!

    Also, some Magic fans have done a really amazing job reverse engineering Photoshop layouts for their custom card designs. Links to the templates are here: http://forums.mtgsalvation.com/showthread.php?t=236172

    Even if your game doesn't look anything like that, for lay designers like me, having the file to manipulate is amazingly helpful.

    Would you mind posting some of your blank Indesign templates? That's a program I'm not as familiar with and having a file to play around with would be really helpful.

    ReplyDelete
  3. DanielSolisMay 7, 2012 at 9:59 AM

    I will do so soon!

    ReplyDelete
  4. MattMay 7, 2012 at 6:25 PM

    I did something like this for some trade show graphics last year. It is so awesome and saves SO much time.
    I wish I had this when I was laying out the Highlander card game or L5R. I bet we would have not made some of the mistakes that happened. :]

    ReplyDelete
  5. DanielSolisMay 7, 2012 at 6:43 PM

    The thing that I'm still learning is how to be really firmly married to a template. I'm used to fiddling until the last minute, but I gotta commit once I hit DataMerge.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Donnie ClarkMay 7, 2012 at 8:09 PM

    This is actually the basis for how we create product catalogs that erin into hundreds or a thousand plus pages. I stated using it for card design. Now if only I can convince Benny how much time this could save...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Tim KeatingMay 9, 2012 at 4:09 PM

    Um, why? As long as the spreadsheet is the canonical source of your data, just tweak the template and re-merge. You ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY have to get out of the habit of tweaking your data inside the ID document, though.

    ReplyDelete
  8. P.D.May 13, 2012 at 11:30 AM

    "Two, you can create a special font for ALL your game icons." This is limited by the fact that a font can only be in one colour. It won't work if you use multi-coloured symbols or even just different colours for different symbols.

    For designing card games, I've started using LaTeX to merge PDF elements and formatted text. It's a similar trick to the datamerge approach.

    ReplyDelete
  9. DanielSolisMay 15, 2012 at 4:18 PM

    Oh man. LaTeX is the point where typography becomes too much like programming for me. DataMerge is going to be my upper-limit of automation for the time being. :)

    ReplyDelete
  10. JohnMay 18, 2012 at 11:26 AM

    Those looking for something a little less expensive -- and a lot easier -- than InDesign will probably be delighted by nanDeck (http://www.nand.it/nandeck/), which is free, and handles data merging from csv files very well.

    I use it to get my games ready for play testing.

    ReplyDelete
  11. fredhicksJune 1, 2012 at 5:06 PM

    You can achieve some of the same effects with GREP styles in InDesign, tho. Like, when you know you're using a "heart" glyph in a certain paragraph style, you could have a GREP style that says, okay, make that red.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Jay TreatOctober 8, 2012 at 9:00 PM

    Finally got to use this. Thanks, Daniel.
    For those about to try this, the useful nugget that's not easy to find is—The name of the columns representing images or files that will be loaded have to start with the '@' symbol.

    ReplyDelete
  13. DanielSolisOctober 8, 2012 at 10:02 PM

    Yes! Very important thing to point out. That's how you can do variable art and iconography, too.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5 Graphic Design and Typography Tips for your Card Game

Image
Chris Farrell of Illuminating Games just wrote a thorough critique of card games setting their body text to be so small that they cannot be read at arm's length, let alone across the table. Here's an excerpt, but the whole thing is worth a read for any would-be card game designers out there. (Myself included.) Break out your copy of the base set of Dominion, and look at the Chapel. This has a text box roughly 3.5cm by 4.5cm. It's got a single line of text. That line of text is 1 (one) millimeter high. 1mm! For me, it's only clearly readable at half an arm's length even in the bright light of day. (...) Compare this to a more sane game like Glory to Rome, where the font size is 2-3 times as large (text is 2mm high, keywords 3mm and usually highlighted). I can generally read Glory to Rome cards across the table, and can certainly see the important keywords. To heap insult upon injury, not only does Glory to Rome have far more legible text than Dominion it also has...
Read more

Low-High Dice Game

Image
A dice game inspired by the stock market (and playing lots of Martian Dice). Roll a bunch of dice and choose which sets to keep. Choose your strategy wisely! Stuff You Need Two-to-Six PLAYERS A PENCIL and PAPER to keep score Thirteen standard six-sided DICE How to Play The shortest player takes the first turn. On your turn, first roll all thirteen dice. Several dice will have matching results. These are called SETS. (A single die result is a set, too.) You must choose a set to keep. For example, your first roll results are 111124445555 . The sets are four 1 s, one 2 , three 4 s, and four 5 s. After keeping a set of dice, lock them up in a row. This is called the GOOD TRACK. For example,  you could keep the set of four 1 s, one 2 , three 4 s, or four 5 s . You decide to keep the four 1 s and line them up in your good track. After keeping a set, you may end your turn or re-roll the remaining unlocked dice. When you re-roll, immediately set aside any results tha...
Read more

One Thing to Avoid in Game Design

Image
When game designer Paul Peterson was interviewed for the upcoming Titans Series of games from Calliope Games, there was one segment at 1:55 that really caught my attention (emphasis mine): "A couple years ago I was teaching people how to play Guillotine and I hadn't played in a while. The first thing I did was say, 'The first thing you gonna do when you open your game is you look through this deck and you take this card.' I pulled out the Callous Guards card and threw it over my shoulder. Everybody laughed. I said, ' That's the biggest mistake I ever made as a game designer in my life.'" Oof. Those are strong words. What's the big deal? For context, the game Guillotine is all about collecting the heads of French nobles during the revolution. There is only one guillotine, with a line of nobles waiting for their grim fate. On your turn, you play action cards to change the order of the line, then take the Noble card from the front of the ...
Read more