After another break from working on this project (outside of playtesting), I finally came back to try and finalize some of the assets and the card design itself. Development on this project has been a little sporadic, but this time I did make more progress and I'm going in a much better direction!
I finally playtested the game with a real person! Jinny tested with me for about 2 hours and she gave me a lot of really good notes. Based on her notes, I made a couple of quick mock-ups. These were mostly to make the Group symbol larger and more prominent on the card. I got feedback to updating the rewards too, so I made a really rough idea here. I'm looking forward to making more updates to further improve the design!
I tried another take at using the number of symbols to display instead of typing a physical number, but when it gets to the maximum (5) of each, the card gets a little busy. So I decided not to go this route, but it was worth trying to see what it looked like.
Then I went back to trying to move some things around to make the group at the top and the cost at the bottom. It felt a little confusing and I didn't really like where this was going. But the costs in the boxes was a little bit better. The harsh corners on those boxes wasn't really speaking the same language as the other rounded shapes though, so I didn't really like that part though.
So I moved everything back to have the cost at the top and the group at the bottom. I decided to move the group icon up so it was still next to the name of the group, but bigger and pops out more so it's more clear of what it's applying to. I also wanted to update the cost to be not white on the light green because it was a little hard to read. The dark green works better I think. Then I also updated the rewards on the right and was much happier with this direction! I used the same rounded shape from the top name box and color-coded them with the reward colors to make it more clear. I'm feeling like this is the right direction now, so I feel like I'm getting much closer to a final design with this. It feels more integrated. I'm not 100% on the colors, but maybe after coming back to it later, I'll make the final call on it.
I decided to go with the design on the left more where there's not a white outline. Then I got feedback about the shape of the Birdian symbol working against the design. So I decided to warp the shape around a bit to make it fit better around the cost number. It went through a lot of minor iterations and I ended up changing the Point and Alert symbols too so they would look different. I also added some more negative space to the Birdian and Alert symbols in the rewards to further differentiate them.
Then I went back to design the starter cards and what their top symbol would look like. I didn't want it to be the Alert symbol so I decided to design something new. I was trying to decide what symbol to put in there as well to indicate that it's a starter card. I ended up using eggs/a nest to indicate this.
From there, I wanted to figure out how to indicate that you'd be losing points or Birdians for certain cards. I wanted it to pop out more with a different color so it'd be more obvious that it was subtracting. I decided to use a red background to show this.
So then I finally imported all of these assets into nanDECK and was able to update my final card layout to match the tests I had been doing in Photoshop. I'm happy with how the card design is coming out. It's improved a lot since I started! And this was thanks to a lot of back and forth with Jinny where I would show her my design and she would give me feedback and make suggestions. It was a fun day of really honing in on this design.
And then from there, I did some prints to see how they looked on paper! I'm still a little on the fence about the colors of the symbols on the right. Some of them might not have enough contrast or be too dark (like the group-specific symbols), so I might have to play around with those a bit. And I'm not 100% sure about the negative space when the symbols are so small. So I might adjust a few things, but I'm getting close!
So after printing them out, I decided to redesign some of the group symbols, change colors on a few of them, then recreated all of them using the Pen Tool. Vector art is always a bit of a challenge for me since it's a lot more mechanical than freeform drawing, but I was pretty happy with how most of these turned out.
And from there, I saved a bunch of the parts out. Then I came up with a new idea on how to implement the ability icons on the card. I had to change the color of the ability circle to match the dark background because some of them weren't standing out anyways. So I started playing around with some ideas to make it much more clear that the icon is associated with the text at the top instead of the ability itself. I'm feeling pretty good about this direction! I'm leaning towards the first one pictured below currently. Though it's the most work, I think it's working the best.
I ended up exporting all of the pieces to use in nanDECK. Then I test exported a few cards just to make sure everything was looking how I wanted it to. I moved a few things around slightly, but overall am happy with how it turned out!
I made a slight adjustment to the starter cards to use a unique letter instead of all being "S" (since it read a bit as a "5"). This way I could make them more recognizable with which deck they belong to. It also helps for anyone who may be color blind so they have another way to determine without relying on colors. With this, I renamed Dark Dragon to "Zoldith". I'm not 100% on the spelling yet, but I know I want his name to start with a Z at least.
And I did a quick test to see if I wanted to move the cost of the groups on the Linkship Pilot cards to the left where the other cost is to make that a bit more obvious. I couldn't really find a position I liked as much, so I decided not to go with that change though.
So that's it for this post! I'm making a lot of progress on the card's design and not looking to make huge changes going forward. I'm finally feeling like this design is finalized and happy with how it's coming out. It's always a great feeling when I get to that stage of it feeling official. I still need to do some testing and polish, then I'll make the decision on if it's truly the final design, but I know that I'm very close, if not already there.
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