5 Tips you can use to design better graphical layouts for your prototypes and game designs!

As a graphic design student, I must say that this is all relevant information that should be considered basic, but it's often ignored even in famous published games.

Graphic design is key to a good game-player interaction.

Very good work :)

My approach to icons and graphic elements is strictly amateur (i.e., based on what seems clear to me), but I did go out of my way find some research on a topic that I knew I didn't know anything about: color.

A Colour Alphabet is the best thing I've found that's not behind a paywall. Figure 2 gives you a palette of 9 color-blind-robust colors that can serve as the basis of differentiating factions, resources, or whathaveyou that you simply cannot afford to have confused for one another.

Figure 4 gives you a larger palette of 27 distinct colors for more complex situations. In a sci-fi game I'm working on, the current draft calls for 12 identifying colors (factions plus resources with no overlap), though knowing it can't possibly be color-blind-robust I know that these colors need to be coupled with distinctive icons in a 13th color (namely, black).

The 12 colors are spaced as widely as I could manage on that palette of 27, taking from each column only the middle or the top-and-bottom.

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But to expand a bit on the existing advice about text, once things get small enough even tiny print-alignment issues can make text unreadable. For this reason, I would recommend that small text be set in a single ink color rather than double-striking to produce a blend. For most situations, that means restricting oneself to a basic CMYK color.

Large text (headlines and logos) don't really have this problem.

Truly large-scale runs can dabble with small text in additional Pantone colors since they can load a fifth or sixth or seventh ink and single-strike the text (these additional inks are sometimes called "spot colors"). If you want to see this in action, look at the flaps on printed cereal boxes and the like, where they'll have test swatches of the inks used. Generally, you'd find CMYK (especially if there is a photo on the box) plus any background color that covers a huge area and sometimes a color or two from the logo.

Another thing to keep in mind for card layout is how will the player be holding the card in their hand and is the most important information going to be visible to the player without them having to fan out their cards too much?

Well the project is open source, I am sure somebody could compile it for windows, unless the requirements are too much linux libraries dependent.

I could not find where the source code is stored. Else, if you are really desperate, you can put linux on an usb key and boot any computer with the key. Then install agave on the key and run it.

It's an overkill, but it's doable.

Thanks for sharing!!