Hey BGDF Members
Does anyone know of any free software for Custom Card design? It would be nice to create card templates for easy card design, such as Items, Monsters, and Quests. Card formats similar to MTG would be nice (ie. Title/Picture/Text Field(s)).
This would just be for a prototype, not for a final product, so I'm not looking for anything too fancy. Anything easier than making and printing cards from Microsoft Excel or Word would be a huge help.
Thanks!
Twenty Percent
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/847000/card-maker-0-98-0-10-updated-7172013
I use Card Maker Beta. It's similar to NanDeck but with a gui to make things easier.
You have to make templates yourself, but it will read information from a spreasheet and populate all the cards that way. So you really only have to make a template (read the instructions) and the program will populate the cards with your data, based on the specifications you make in the template.
It really depends on your exact needs and your willingness to invest time.
You can already create cards with the MtG dimensions in Open Office (free alternative to MS Office), but if you want to spend more time or want more versatility you can always learn Gimp, Inkscape or Scribus. Personally I do everything in Illustrator or Photoshop, but that's not for free. Protip: Many Universities give a HUGE discount to their students and employees for buying Adobe (and other) software products. A couple of years ago I paid $45 for a legal version of Adobe CS3.
Actually I use MS Publisher to self publish. I create a table with the card dimensions and save it. That is my template for card sizes. Both of my games are done this way.If you want to get your games commercially published Then you would need to find out what format the publisher you'll use requires and get software that accomplishes that. Game crafter uses Adobe Photoshop (PSD), Adobe Illustrator (AI), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Portable Network Graphics (PNG).
Inkscape as previously mentioned will do SVG.
If you want to try nanDECK, in this blog post there is an example of a template (with data from an Excel file):
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/14687/a-card-template-for-nandeck
By the way, I am writing a GUI for nanDECK, some info here:
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/23061/visual-nandeck
I wrote some tool as well (draw template(s) in Inkscape, run the extension with card data from a spreadsheet document (CSV) to generate sheets of cards):
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/299033/inkscape-extensions-for-boardgame...
nand, did you think of using some standard format (and thus available editors) rather than going through the trouble of making your own GUI? I decided to base my tool on Inkscape (and on SVG) because to replicate all the tools available to create templates in Inkscape would require many, many man-years of work, plus any other editor that exports to SVG can be used instead (eg Illustrator).
The downside of basing my tool on SVG is that it is a very complex format, and I don't want to implement all of it, so some features in Inkscape will cause problems (which do not mean that they can not be used at all, but those parts of the templates has to be rendered to bitmaps, which is luckily just a single key-press to do in Inkscape). I still consider that downside worth it, and every time there is a new Inkscape release "my" template editor just got better for free.
If you need to make a lot of unique cards, there is also the magic set editor that allows you to define your own template and manage collections of cards.
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