It’s been a very exciting and busy week! I was tired of staring at the same ol' playing cards that I found on a free game assets website, and create my own. Now I will be the first to admit, I am not a great designer. However, I am very proud of what I came up with. After 6 hours of Photoshop-ing, and several renditions, these are the results (zoom in):

Now that looks much better, in my opinion. I ultimately decided on a simple design that is easy to read with the option of a white-backed card or a color-backed card. Ultimately I want visually impaired friendly graphics, as that hits close to home for me. I spent most of the next evening creating variables and data sets in the Photoshop template so that I can batch generate all 52 cards in a standard deck.

My goal of this week was to have an alpha build ready to distribute for testing and audio design. Unfortunately I couldn’t just throw the new cards in and click “build”, there was still some vital functionality missing. The rest of the week was spent building out the following features:

• Basic score tabulation (there’s a lot to improve here)
• Game timer
• Menus (main menu, options menu, pause menu, etc)
• New Background Image

Also drop shadows; A.K.A. the bane of my existence. At first, I thought, “well I can just add a drop shadow to my card template and re-export”. How wrong and naive I was. I never considered what would happen when you stack multiple cards with drop shadows. You see, the cards' shadows stack too, and what was once a nice partially transparent shadow, is now a black outline. Without going into all of the details of the hours and days that followed fighting this issue, let’s talk about what I settled on. I decided to divide the drop shadows into eight parts; the top, bottom, left, right and all four corners. I added the pieces of shadow to the game, and now can programmatically show or hide parts of shadow depending on a card’s location. There are still a few areas to tweak, but it actually works quite well!

I am happy to say, even with several bumps along the way, I have an alpha build ready for distribution! And without further ado:

Let me know if you’d like to help test or lend a hand with card designs!