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Up to this point, I had only focussed on rules and game mechanics. These didn’t stray too far off the beaten track, but I liked the theme and the combination of different game elements folded into one. In order to really make something compelling, I knew that it had to be visually clear and appealing.
To say that I am not a visual artist is putting it mildly (see Exhibit A below) and though I’ve had a go at templates before (see Exhibit B), I wasn’t completely convinced with my ability and anyway, I used AI placeholder art, so still not great with the artwork, even if I could theoretically throw together something vaguely appealing from a card template perspective.
What to do, then, to progress my idea into something tangible?
I started with what I had – some basic sketches in my notebook, more about positioning of attributes and general layout. If you’ve ever tried, you’ll know that it’s exceedingly difficult to actually glean much from this type of exercise other than a very vague set of instructions to provide to someone who actually has an artistic flair.
My wife suggested that I go to Fiverr or Upwork to find someone who could help bring my ideas to life. I did do this and I took time putting together a full brief, which I’ll discuss in a separate post as it deserves the air space, but in the meantime I tried an impatient and speedier route.
A foray into generated cards
I do not doubt that AI could generate a set of cards that are playable and vaguely nice. That, however, is not my experience with it and I struggle to see how it could create something truly compelling.
My prompts may have been half the issue, sure. These are not lost, I just have no intention of digging them out of my ChatGPT history. Instead, I will show you a tableau of attempts to get something together.
For each of these, I took the same line from the database and asked it to populate the data into the cards as an example, after providing some instruction on how I wanted the template to look like. I iterated a few times and tried from scratch once or twice. You can see above in the gallery of failures that the results were not so great.
My conclusion was simple and one I sort of figured before I set out — if I was going to do this, I’d need to get someone who actually had artistic and design abilities.
A bit of fun after failure was admitted
Before I embarked on anything more serious, I did play around a little asking for the cards in styles of actual TCGs – a selection below for fun.
Where to next?
I didn’t know any professional artists or certainly not any with this type of design and artwork abilities. The only answer was to find one online. In another post I’ll talk about how I went about that.