Taken from page 17 of the black sketchbook.
When making a card game from scratch, I've learnt that one of the most difficult tasks is deciding the dimensions of your cards, their layout or how they should look in their final versions. Their size is crucial to determining a good tactile feel or how pleasant they are to hold. Their size is also largely dependant on what will go on the card, be it text, images or symbols, and must be done correctly or the final product will not be as ideal as you planned.
In Last Chance Saloon, their are four different types of cards:
Character cards
'Mission' cards
1st, 2nd and 3rd Place cards
'Rival' cards
All of these cards do a different job in gameplay, and coming up with these card types was the result of thorough and meticulous planning and play-testing from a paper prototype of my game.
And of course, when designing cards, you must also decide on the dimensions for them. This part of game production was one of the most difficult things to think about for a few reasons:
Each card type should be a different size to make them more distinguishable from each other. Most successful card games incorporate this method
Planning how much text can fit on the card
Planning how big any images can be before being too large
Deciding on card sizes is a lot about ergonomics. If the card is too big and cumbersome to hold, it will negatively affect the player's experience of that game, whereas if the card is a good size to hold in one hand, it feels friendlier and will have a positive impact on gameplay. The same principal applies to any type of design, whether you're designing a car interior or a child's toy. The most important thing about ergonomics is doing your best to help develop a good relationship between a person and an object in that object's design.
The photograph underneath details a piece of my research into existing standard card sizes. The card I researched into is commonly considered the most standard card size, and is the size most playing cards typically come in. I took the measurements from both a Magic: The Gathering card, a card game of which also set their sizes to this standard size, and a card from the game Vampire: The Eternal Struggle. By doing this research, I developed a better understanding of what most successful card games set their card sizes to, and make me speculate on whether I should print to this size.
I included notes on what the card had on it, and the significance of these details in terms of gameplay.
I learnt that the standard card size is 8.7cm in height and 6.3cm in width.
26/02/2020
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