Nay Saga Devlog 8: Final Card Design

I know it’s taken me a long time but I finally have a final card design. It’s really mostly thanks to my friend Jinny, but I’ll get into that during this CUPdate!

So I started out by getting feedback from my friends on the overall card design. They helped me decide which elements to combine from each of my tests and I decided to go with the lighter card color for the symbols with the white for the actual symbol to help it stand out the most. And then the coloring on the strength/weaknesses. So I had it mostly figured out finally, but I realized I wanted to see how the card would look without the border and it made me think about how I wanted to design the outer aspects of the card in case it’s not actually cut off. So I worked out a bunch more design variations to try and figure it out further.

I printed a few of the designs and noticed a few things. First, the printer didn't pick up on the contrast, so I'll have to hope the final printer does (or adjust accordingly). And secondly, I realized a lot of the little elements I was playing around with didn't really read very well when printed. So I decided that the little details weren't super important. I'm thinking about going with (6) from the ones above (the bottom-right in the image below).

So first I started with some minor tweaks to the original design. I changed the top part of the card so that it slightly mirrors the bottom part but isn't too distracting with a lot of extra elements that would distract from the overall design.

I thought about potentially adding colors matching the strength and weaknesses but it kind of clashed too much with the other colors so I decided to probably not go with it. But I’m still thinking on if the symbols are recognizable enough without their respective colors or not.

I saved each individual part out for all of the types to test how it looks with different colors, characters, and traits. When I took them into nanDECK, I realized I had to adjust a few of the positions like for the traits. So I made those updates. There are a few of the colors I’m still playing around with, but I’ll work on those and come back to them later.

Then I printed one of each type color out to see how they’d look as prints. There are a few card colors I need to work on though (mainly Ice, Dark, and Water). And then I’m considering making the trait circles a little bigger so there’s more space around them, but I’ll have to play around with that and see if it messes up the existing layout at all to do that.

I adjusted some of the colors because the ice and water were a bit hard to read. I tried changing the color of the type to white or darker and kinda liked it more.

While I made some progress, it still wasn’t quite finished enough. So I was lucky that my friend Jinny  took a look at my designs and spent a night sitting down with me and recreating it on her computer. She helped me figure out what I could do to improve the card design! I’ve been having trouble with it and she took my inspirations and built a design from scratch. These are the designs she made:

And then I printed them all out and compared them to my existing ones (hers on the bottom mine on the top). The heart/fire, ice/water, and earth/metal all look a little too similar so I needed to work on those, but I’m liking how they came out!

So then I worked on updating the colors. I wasn’t 100% on the font either so I tried changing it back to what I had. I slightly updated some placements and small tweaks as well. Then I printed those versions out as well.

I tweaked some colors and plugged the actual values into nanDECK to get their actual traits. I tweaked and printed a few times but finally ended up with what I think is finally the final card design!

And I printed one of each type to make sure. I’m really happy with how far I’ve come and that I can officially say the designs are done! The only tweaks I would make is slight changes to colors to make them a little less alike or easier to read, but otherwise they’re good to go.

Then I started to come up with ideas for names of each of the game modes. I have at least better placeholders now even if they change.

I made a table to try and organize all of the game rules that I came up with so far since it’s been a couple of months since I did a playtest. I converted it to a printable sheet to help with playtests as well.

So then I played one of each mode after printing the final card designs. I took some notes on minor changes and actually ended up finding a new way to play one of the modes that makes it a lot more interactive and fun. This involved using some of the scoring tokens that I’m making for one of the other modes anyways.

And otherwise, I continued to finish some drawings of characters that I had to continue to add to the roster. Most of these were sketches originally that I just colored or finished digitally. But a few of them were brand new drawings.

So overall I’m getting closer to the end! I have some fun updates coming for next time that I decided to save. I’m hoping to start doing some of the actual final print tests through the official site by the 10th dev log. So soon!