After signing up for the free trial of Adobe Illustrator, I then got to work tinkering. I started with the simple search of what size trading cards typically were (3.5in x 2.5in – I’d prefer a nice metric measurement as standard, but this is the standard). So I created an artboard of that size and then got started (NOTE: this was a big mistake which I’ll come back to in a later post, but definitely don’t do this if you ever plan to print or actually use the cards physically!).
First real design attempt
I don’t think this is necessarily all that bad, I just didn’t really know what I was doing and hadn’t figured out all of the mechanics as yet. Really I was starting to design without actually having thought too much through except for some for some of the basics as discussed here. Before long I left this card and jumped to the next, not quite having finished it. Sometimes it feels good to step back from something for a while and see what you think when you come back.
This was just another iteration with a different faction in the game and an attempt using the Adobe AI generator to get a spaceship involved. Not hugely different though I played around with another logo and with the artwork on top of the outline. Finally I moved on to a totally different card type in my first stint.
The AI was less than convincing on this one, though I think I really just ran out of steam. I wasn’t even really sure what I was going for and then stopped working on it.
A Step Back
After messing around in Adobe Illustrator trying to figure out how it worked and then slowly getting the hang of it and a feel for some of the card elements I’d need, I finally took a step back and realised that there was a whole bunch of planning I hadn’t done even beyond figuring out the game mechanics themselves:
- What attributes would cards have?
- How many different attributes would become problematic? What was the limit?
- What were the standard features on the cards?
- How prominent was the artwork?
- Did the narrative matter much or was it mostly about the attributes?
I still don’t have answers to these – not all of them at least. For now the cards are very much a prototype to help me think about how the game could work. It is useful at least from that perspective to have something there that can help to visualise how an end state might be.
Next up
Next time I’m going to discuss the most recent iteration of the prototype designs that I’ve done, how I tried to answer some of the above questions and design those elements into the cards and why I’ve paused on the design of the cards themselves for a moment and started to think more about what cards will be from an attributes perspective. This includes creating a database and thinking a bit more about the rules.