Card Creator V2 - A smoother workflow

I had a couple goals in mind when I set out to rebuild the Card Creator.  First, I wanted to be able to update a Google Spreadsheet document, and have the card creator read directly from there for building the cards, and second, I wanted to remove the Cairo dependency, because it wasn't working very well and I wanted to use Node4 which broke node-canvas.

Version 2 of the Card Creator does exactly that.  I hooked up the Card Creator into Google Sheets using the npm module: google-spreadsheet, and I swapped out node-canvas and Cairo for LibGD and node-gd.  What that entailed was a full rebuild of the card creation logic, but it was good to go back over it and update it and smooth out some of the minor issues.

In addition I redrew much of the art for the icons so that I could use non-pixel art instead, which scales better.  Granted, I am no artist, but I am doing all of the temporary art until I can find an artist to work with, if I decide to pursue this project seriously.

If you haven't read my previous post.  Card Creator is an application written in NodeJS that automates creating playing cards for a card game I'm working on.  It allows me to rapidly prototype and handles design, combining art assets, etc into print sheets for ease of production.

This new Card Creator program has improved my workflow significantly.  With the old program, making card changes required me to update the JSON files individually and change the values for each key/value pair in order to generate the cards.  Now I simply create a new row in my google document and run the program and it pulls in all the changes.  It's really nice for rapid prototyping.  I'm able to tweak values, update the descriptions, and then immediately run the program to generate the cards, and the sheetify script to create print sheets.

The script has a few points of interest you'll want to consider when using it.  First it's run by using the command: node creator-google-sheets.js which is the primary file.  (Make sure you're on branch version2).  The first thing you need to do to run it is include a google spreadsheet key to a google document.  In order to use the sheet, you'll need to publish it to the web, and then you'll have a link that has a long string in it.  That's your spreadsheet key.

I put my key in a private.js file which isn't included in the repository, so you can do the same, or you can simply replace the require('./private.js').google_sheets_key; on line 15 of the script with the string.  In addition if your spreadsheet has differently named headers for your spreadsheet, you'll need to update those in the mapping function (convertRow) on line 73.  That basically maps the row data to fields that the icon creator, background creator, etc are expecting.

The Card Creator works similar to before, it draws the background, the title, the description and the icons and then outputs it as a png file.  One thing to note, is that if you're working with node-gd, the documentation isn't fantastic, so it might take some trial and error to figure out how the functions work exactly.  For example, it took me a little bit to figure out which copy function worked for copying one image onto another.  Use copyResampled.  At least that's the only one that worked well for what I was doing.

I'm also rebranding the Card game I'm working on a bit, tossing some names around trying to find one I like.  I have a couple in mind, so we'll see if they stick in play testing.

Anyway feel free to check out the new Card Creator on my Github Page, if you're working with NodeJS linking up to google sheets documents is really quite simple and fantastic for automating work.  You can make the document read only (like I did) or allow programs to write to cells as well.  Nifty!

Cheers and thanks for reading!

Jason C / WakeskaterX

Node Card Creator - Sheetify JS - Automating Print Sheet Creation

The NodeJS Card Creator is finally coming together as a tool I can use to streamline the development process.  If you haven't read the first blog post, I encourage you to go check out how I built the Card Creator and how you can set up your environment to do the same in my post: Card Creator - Automating Card Creation in NodeJS  You can also view the entire project here, at my GitHub account:  https://github.com/WakeskaterX/CardCreator

The next big piece -- a simple, but important piece of the automation process -- was finished just the other day: Sheetify.JS.  This Sheetify script takes all of the cards that are created in the cards folder and groups them into groups of 9, which fit onto a standard 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper.  It then draws the cards to these sheets and outputs them to a sheets folder to be ready for printing.  Having this change it allows me to rapidly prototype by changing values, running 2 scripts and then printing the desired print sheets.  There is of course, the cutting out of the cards, so perhaps I can build some kind of cutting stencil, but in the mean time this has vastly improved the prototype speed.

Here is an example of the output sheet:

In addition to Sheetify the other thing I updated in the script was the ability to specify card images for the artwork section.  I made a few shitty drawings in Paint.NET to test it, but it works very well.

Here is an example of a Fire Spell with the image added to the card:

And that's pretty much it!  The sheet automation has been super helpful, so the next step is finding an artist to work with me on the project and playtest, playtest, playtest to hammer down the mechanics!

Updates to the Card Creator & Work on Sorceror's Arena

I've got some updates to the Card Creator application out (which you can find on GitHub here:  https://github.com/WakeskaterX/CardCreator ) as well as some updates to a card game I'm working on tentively named Sorceror's Arena.

Now I'm no amazing designer, but I managed to improve the image quality a bit and have a slightly better design for the automated card creation.  Before I was doing a lot of the card creating by hand in Paint.NET and it certainly gets tedious as I make small changes and need to create demo print sheets.  Reducing that workload was the purpose of the Card Creator and it's finally starting to look better than the cards I've created by hand which is why I haven't been using it until now.

So here is a quick look at what my currently printed prototypes look like, what the old generated cards looked like, and the recent change I just made to the card creator.

Current Prototype

Old Generated Image

New Generated Image

Now it is a little hard to tell in the two generated images, but the Icon fidelity went up greatly, and the fonts look better too.  Before the generated images didn't have any kind of indicator for rarity, and so that was added as well to have some differentiation in the cards.

There is still a lot to do, I need images, background art, a decent background for the description box, and I need to create the JSON files for the Lightning and Water sets, all just to make a first decent prototype.  That said, I may still hold off on images until I can find an actual artist to work with.

Little by little I find time to work on it and polish the game, in addition to the play testing and adjusting card values so nothing is TOO overpowered.  The project is still very early so it'll be a long time before any kind of release ever happens.

Card Creator - Automating Card Creation in NodeJS

Card Creator is a little tool I've been working on for automating the creation of card graphics for a card game I'm working on (tentatively) called Sorcerer's Arena.  The purpose of the tool is to automate the combining of art and font assets from a set of JSON data into the image PNG assets needed to print the cards.

You can find the current version on GitHub and it works pretty well at the moment.  I need to find better images (not a phenomenal artist here) and I need to find some good fonts and backgrounds, but the program works.

Card Creator uses NodeJS and Node Canvas to render images in a canvas style way on the server.  I looked into a few alternatives like Graphics Magick  and Image Magick but neither were particularly suited to combining images easily in a layered format like the HTML5 Canvas is (and by extension Node Canvas, which uses Cairo).  By far, the installation and debugging of the setup of this project took the longest, so I'll go into the problems I came across and how I resolved them as well.

Setting It Up

First, this project was a pain in the arse to set up.  Cairo has many dependencies, all of which may or may not be working, and Node Canvas also has some issues as well with the latest versions.  First things first, you need Cairo.  My experience is with a Mac Book Pro, so it may differ if you have Windows or a Linux Distro.  

I ran into a few problems, namely I had issues with:

• Multiple Installations of Cairo (Brew vs MacPorts, etc)
• The Version of Cairo & Dependencies
• The Version of Node Canvas

I created the project in NodeJS with the latest version of Node Canvas, Async and put a small sample together using a few image and some text.  I set up my Git repository and then began getting things set up with Cairo which Node Canvas relies on.

I had installed Cairo for Mac a long time before, but never got things working with it.  That was installed with Brew, and when I started this project, I tried a new installation method using MacPorts.  Using MacPorts only caused more issues, because some things were referencing the Brew installation and dependencies and some were referencing the MacPorts, and everything just broke.

So I uninstalled everything from MacPorts, and uninstalled everything Cairo related from Brew and tried the whole re-installation from Brew, because Brew tends to be pretty solid.  I made sure that I had all the dependencies I needed for Cairo and Brew would tell me which I did not have linked correctly.  After the MacPorts debacle, I had to manually link a few of the Brew libraries to get them all set up. 

It ended up working, and I could generate images with Node Canvas but I still had issues.  Namely, I could not get using Fonts to work correctly and could not get them to render correctly either.  As I dove into this issue, part of it turned out to be a known issue with the latest version of Cairo on Mac OSX Machines, so ultimately to get around it, I used Brew to install all of the dependencies that Cairo required, I then uninstalled Cairo from Brew since the only version available on Brew was 1.14.0 which did not work correctly.  I then reinstalled a 1.12.X version directly from a the Cairo Releases FTP which cleared up a few issues with the font sizing and not rendering correctly.

However, I STILL had issues.  I could not load TTF Fonts into Node Canvas, which is something it is supposed to support.  So I started looking into this and found that it was a recent issue in Node Canvas.  So after some searching and debugging, I blew away the node modules folder and instead of using Node Canvas version 1.2.11 (the latest version), I hard set the version to 1.1.0.  And FINALLY everything worked.  I was able to load in True Type Font files and display them on the cards.  Using old versions of both Cairo and Node Canvas.  

Just a side note:  All this debugging and set up took me longer than it took me to make the current version of the application (~7 commits in at the time of writing this).

So now I had everything working, I could position text and images, use fonts, and build cards to my specifications.  Now I could build my application.

The Application

The application is fairly simple, if you've ever worked with the HTML5 Canvas before, it should feel very similar.  First, the main entry point for the app is the creator.js file.

Creator.js uses the following workflow to generate card graphics:

• First, load in the libraries, configs, and most importantly, the card sets in the /card_values directory.  This file is where all of the settings to generate each card are stored in JSON format.
• Next, Iterate through each card from the combined JSON files and perform the following:
• Create a canvas element with setting specified in a general config setting.
• Load all of the True Type Fonts in with the font loader library.
• Draw the Background of the card on the Canvas.
• Draw the Icons for the element types and stats, (and if this is a Sorcerer card, the miniature icons).
• Write the Description Text in the main box.
• Write the Title of the Card at the top.

And that's the entire flow.  Unlike some of my other blog posts I won't go too into the code but that's essentially how it all works.  

What this allows me to do is make small changes in the main configuration file, changes images, add images, change text or descriptions and update cards and quickly generate the entire set and images in seconds.  This allows me to try different things, modify entire sets of cards and not worry about having to manually create the cards in Paint.NET (which is what I was doing before).

As it is now, the quality of the cards isn't up to par with creating them as pixel art in Paint.NET, but I'm working to improve that and make the quality better.  Primarily I need to find a good way to create bordered fonts that aren't see through on the inside which most tend to be that I've found.  This application also paves the way for getting an artist on the project later and being able to quickly create cards as new art assets come in.

The end result of this project is that I can take something like this:

And turn it into this (below) with just a single command (node creator.js).

So far the application has been very handy for prototyping, and all of the code is open source so if you like making card games, feel free to extend the project and build on it for your own game!

I'll be building more on the application as well.  A few features I would like to add in the future are:

• Creating the JSON files directly from a CSV, Excel Document or Google Spreadsheets documents (since I normally work in Google Spreadsheets for building the cards).
• Better Fonts and possibly auto loading & mapping all fonts in the fonts directory.
• Images for the cards, currently none exist and none are attempted to be drawn in the creator code yet.
• Legit background (other than some grey boxes and a yellowish background color).

So that's my Card Creator application, if you haven't used Node Canvas I encourage you to check it out, but definitely pay attention when you're setting it up and potentially just use older versions to get it working correctly.  Once it's all set up, Node Canvas is pretty fun and easy to use for building server side imaging applications.


See Post #2 on the Card Creator:  http://blog.wakeskaterstudio.com/2015/11/updates-to-card-creator-work-on.html