That’s good enough for now! Let’s move on to adding the data for each card to a spreadsheet… 2. Make sure the exported file type is PDF, as shown in the screenshot above. This will hold all your graphics for every card, as well as the spreadsheet for the InDesign Data Merge. I recommend creating a folder called Links inside your project folder for your game. Under Export to: click the folder icon on the right to set your destination for the exported files. FIND AND REPLACE INDESIGN DATA MERGE LABELS PDFYou’re ready to export your graphics as PDF files! Select File > Export > Export for Screens. Change the name of that arboard to Cost.ĭo the same for the attack and defence shapes, naming them Attack and Defence. It will automatically create a new artboard that is exactly the size of that shape. Switch back to the Artboard Tool and click once on the hexagon. Switch back to the Selection Tool and drag the cost, attack, and defence shapes off to the side: Change the name of this artboard to Card-Basic. At the top of the screen, you’ll see a Name field. When you click the Artboard Tool, the current artboard is highlighted. The Artboard Tool is in your toolbar, and looks like this: Illustrator allows you to create multiple artboards in a single document. Using Artboards to export multiple graphics What if we had cards in our game that don’t have a cost? Or don’t have an attack or defence stat? Let’s separate those objects so that later on, we can easily turn them on or off. We could export this whole layout and save it as a single graphic, but that doesn’t give us much flexibility. The artwork for the card will go here, on a layer behind everything else.Īside from the artwork, we’ve got a place for the card’s cost (blue hexagon), the card’s attack (red) and defence (green), the card’s title (top blue rectangle), the card’s type (middle blue rectangle) and the card’s description (bottom blue rectangle). Note that the area in the middle is transparent. The rest of the document is your safe zone, where all of your card art will be.ĭon’t forget to zoom in on the bottom-right corner and create the same guides there.įor the purposes of this tutorial, I’ve made a very basic card layout. There shouldn’t be any information critical to your game here, but some games use borders with different colours to differentiate card types. This will get cut off after it’s printed. The outermost 1/8″ is your bleed, and should be an extension of your border. Zoom in on the top-left corner of the document and drag off some guides in these positions (hold Shift while creating the guides so they snap to the grid): Turn on grid snapping by selecting View > Snap to Grid. In the Preferences, set the Grid to have a Gridline every 1″, with Subdivisions set to 16: If you are only doing a digital version, set the Color Mode to RGB. If you are planning on doing a printed version of your game, set the Color Mode to CMYK. Add 1/8″ bleed around all four edges of your card, making the total size 2.75″ x 3.75″. Open Adobe Illustrator and create a new document: If you use Photoshop, export all your assets as PNG files using Adobe Generator. The instructions below are for Illustrator. NOTE: In the sample project, I’ve included card templates for both Illustrator and Photoshop which one you use is a matter of personal preference. This will help you figure out exactly which elements need to be on each card type, approximately how big they should be, and where on the card they live. You don’t have to have finished artwork to get started, but I’ve found that it’s very helpful to do a basic mockup of your card layout in Illustrator before doing anything else.
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