Game Cards Design Kit

Another solution for importing data from text files are layer variables. In Photoshop you can create a text layer and associate a variable with it. It's possible to load a data file in specific format, that will generate data sets. With data sets it's possible to change card's contents quickly. Some examples are available in this article.

These questions made me think for a while about some improvements I can make in this design kit. What kind of automated features would be nice? What do you think?

Ideas I have now:

• script (with dialog box, file chooser etc.) to load a data file (e.g. CSV or other specific format) - also available in a way I described above,
• script (also with configurable settings as paper size, rows, columns, space between and so on) to create a grid-based layout for printing more than one card on a page.

What other features would be helpful in such kind of design kit?

I'll think about some kind of solution to achieve something like this.

It's also possible to do so with data sets I've described earlier. You can create layers with all icons, badges and all the stuff and with data set variable you can control visibility of there layers.

Some example:

1. You can create e.g. 5 different card designs (background, color, etc.) and save them as flattened layers (for performance reasons) in a new file.
2. Add icons, badges, text layers etc.
3. Define variables for visibility of each layer as described in article posted earlier.
4. Create a CSV file (e.g. in MS Excel) with each variable defined.
5. Load the file as data set and proceed as described in the article.

One disadvantage of this solution is that you have to create separate variables for each layer and in the data file there can be really large number of columns (5 backgrounds = 5 variables and only one of them set to "visible" in each data row - it would be better if there was only one variable with layer name to show).

You have to remember that Photoshop is software for graphic manipulation, so some features can be hard or even impossible to implement.

I'll not have free time to play with Photoshop scripts until end of July or even later, so I can't promise anything now, but the idea is very interesting and I'm curious how it do it and how it will work.

Thanks for the idea and inspiration :)

To be honest some license aspects of Envato Marketplaces (such as Graphicriver) are not clear even for authors. I think your interpretation is correct (when we talk about regular, not extended license which is applicable when you're going to publish and sell the final game), but the best way to be sure is to contact Envato support (unfortunately sometimes they respond after quite long time, e.g. 5-7 days).

When you plan to publish and sell the game or other products based on the Envato Marketplaces items I think the best way is to try and prepare everything under regular license (which is quite inexpensive when you consider the authors work and time spent on the item's creation and the fact that the authors get about 50% of the sales value) and then, if the final result is good and the product is ready for sale, get the extended license.

Thanks for the purchase and for the information about the issue.

Minimum Photoshop version is Photoshop CS (8.0) - that information is on the item description on Graphicriver, but I've sent you a message with some detailed questions. I hope I'll be able to help you with that.