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Show HN: Card Proxy Generator – Generate printable game cards from JSON

mitchkeenan.com

21–30 of 46 posts

Re: Show HN: Card Proxy Generator – Generate printable game cards from JSON

#21
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the OP, but as someone who dabbles in tabletop game design, I find these kind of generators very useful for game prototyping. (The one I've used most in the past is called Squib[1] and it's an open source Ruby codebase and very configurable.) It's often a huge pain to write prototype cards by hand, especially when you have to do it multiple times while iterating the design. (Though in some cases a generator w…

This is neat. I'm curious, how does printing work after the prototyping stage? Would you usually find a publisher, who handles it for you? Are there other tools like Squib for making homespun tabletops?

https://www.denexa.com/

Not my company, but one ran by a friend I used to game with in the early 2000's, they print some very high quality cards at a good rate.

Re: Show HN: Card Proxy Generator – Generate printable game cards from JSON

#22
post #12

There's a bunch of (usually pretty arcane) software for generating cards. I like this because it takes JSON, as opposed to having to click around a GUI. The real challenge though is to get a nice design. You should be able to put in some templates/generate some templates, and add image URIs/upload images. That would be truly awesome.

Agreed 110% on the ability to include images, maybe a key for an image URL and another key for the location on the card using a simple grid-reference?

Great suggestion, hope OP sees it because I'm already very interested in using this tool.

Re: Show HN: Card Proxy Generator – Generate printable game cards from JSON

#23

I like the simplicity of the UX, I would find it much more usable open source so I can adjust the template easily. I wrote a similar thing for my board game site [0], using yml files as data sources with jekyll includes to generate the html and a html2canvas conversion to make printable images of individual cards that I have to manually put on a print-sheet -- not quite as streamlined as this, and I would love to lea…

I’d probably create a tex-template for the cards, populate it with data from the json/yml-input and run it through pdf-latex.

You could probably create the entire thing as an bibtex-template and even use that to build the tex.

Re: Show HN: Card Proxy Generator – Generate printable game cards from JSON

#25
Just got off work and saw all the comments. I wrote this up a few months ago to make custom cards for a mafia/werewolf type game I've been playing at work (as some guessed). It's 100% client side and uses jsPDF[0]. You can find the (very rough) source on my github[1]. Future plans include better styling and some changes to allow easier clearing of the template. Thanks!

[0]: https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF

[1]: https://github.com/konamacona/cardproxy

Re: Show HN: Card Proxy Generator – Generate printable game cards from JSON

#26
Nice!

Boardgamegeek has a list of card design resources:

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/991506/resources-card-game-...

Most are of the painstakingly-click-and-type variety, though. There are a handful based around a more site-generatorish workflow that look pretty sweet:

https://github.com/vaemendis/hccd/

https://github.com/ghostsquad/pycard

http://cardpen.mcdemarco.net/doc/index.html

Re: Show HN: Card Proxy Generator – Generate printable game cards from JSON

#27
I imagine it'd be pretty straightforward to convert that JSON into a CSV for InDesign's Data Merge feature, once you're past prototyping and ready for product-ready printing. http://blog.ironmarkgames.com/creating-prototype-cards-using...

Re: Show HN: Card Proxy Generator – Generate printable game cards from JSON

#28
post #14

Awesome! Just the tool I needed. I am developing my own board game and the hustle to create the cards to print and test was getting in the way of actually thinking about the game and the rules. A small suggestion: add a image-top and a image-bottom fields where you put a URL and the PDF includes the image on the card.

If you want a more featureful tool, but still data-oriented and built with a programming-slant, I highly recommend Squib[1]. It has tons of rendering and processing options, and fairly thorough documentation (unlike pretty much everything else out there).

[1] - http://squib.rocks/

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