Creating Cards, part 3

It's time for the final post in this sequence: Final touches & Applying a graphics style to the card.

Creating Cards, part 2

Note to self: When you're in your illustrator document and try to run the customize script and it fails (gracefully!) and you can't figure out why it's complaining that you don't have the layers you think you do, check what document you're in. It's probably right. In this case, I had a document open which had a screenshot pasted into it that I was using to create the images for these posts - looked exactly like my Illustrator workspace, it was the strangest thing when the buttons didn't work...

Anyways, part 2 of this illustrated guide after the jump: I create a customized action card, complete with text, graphic styles and more!

Creating Cards

So I recently did a bunch of Illustrator scripting to make building power cards for my short adventure easier. I was writing up a bunch of this to give an overview in an email, then I realized a blog post is actually a much better venue for explaining this sort of thing, so here it is - be warned it's a fair bit of images, though hopefully they are all pretty small! I'm not sure how it'll look on a RSS feed, either, but as long as you can get near 900 pixels width it'll be pretty good (I think).

Here's the idea: Make it easy to create a very customized card for our game. Here's an example of one such card.


What did I do to create this card? Well, obviously many areas of the card have been customized, and the whole thing has been colored specifically for Sira. More details after the break - all the images here are from my card setup and templates, but it's pretty easy to customize.

Note that it was a bit tricky to get decent image quality for the web while not making huge files, up until I realized I'd chosen a poor format to use. All of the base stuff is in a vector format, so any low quality images here are just my choice of resolutions, etc.