From Paper to Sheets & Beyond

Going from hand-drawn card games and only in your head cards to the next step can feel really daunting but it’s much easier than you might think. After you have a good idea of if your card game will work and you’ve played through it several times with handmade components it may be time to move up. We’ll go over some of the tools we use on Card Bard like InDesign’s data merge tool and google sheets, plus putting it all together and some helpful game dev tips along the way.

Excel (or as with our own workflow google sheets) has lots of benefits, like organization, the ability to see things (component names and abilities as well as costs and power levels) all at a glance, for power users you can sort and even build charts and graphs to track and measure component in all sorts of ways (see “things” parenthetical) to help you in your game dev journey! A note of caution it’s easy to get bogged down in the particulars and stagnate your development, so try to do as little as possible at once, don’t jump straight into chart town if you’re just getting started moving from strictly pen and paper.

Step 1: Setup

Create a sheet with your game title and some pertinent information (development test version 1.0 or whatever is important to you) staying organized is key.

Now you will use row 1 as your titles/id row. In this row label each column with the title of information or images to be displayed on the component, in our example cards.

A card bard card has TYPE SUBTYPE NAME INSTRUMENT KEYWORDS KEYWORD DESCRIPTION EFFECT FAME @INFOBAR FLAVOR and @CARDART

A note on the “@“ – we use adobe in design to create our printable PDFs aka final product. This denotes to the program an image should be used for this data type. Other programs use this markup as well but some do not. We have also used Paperize.io which uses nearly the same techniques. Paperize does allow for images but when we used it was only using text.

Step 2: Fill ‘er Up!

Now that you have your data titles put in that data! Once we got our initial thoughts from pen and paper into our sheet this became where we put all of our new ideas and how we tracked changes and progress. Make sure this is a living document, not a stone tablet! Sometimes you may even need to add new data types, and that’s great! Do it here, and if you decide you don’t need it anymore trash that column. Filling is simple, place your names in the name column, your effects in the effects and so on. For images there are a few ways to handle it but the easiest and best for us is a relative file path.

Sounds scary, it’s stupid simple. We run off of Dropbox so each of us has all of our Card Bard files in the same spot… relatively. When you export the sheet it will just need to be in the same relative spot as the production files (in design files in our case) and it works out. So we have everything in the same spot and fill in our image columns like this:

/links/art/cardname.png

The / in front is what makes it relative, that represents the current folder that the production files are housed.

You can name your files however and as long as they are spelled correctly everything will work out. For simplicities sake we have named all of our art files with the names of cards, some developers like to use a numbered system in case names change etc.  totally up to you.

Step 3: Export Part One

Now that all of your data is in and you feel great about everything, export! Export your sheet as a CSV (comma-separated values) and save it in your favorite spot (Dropbox for us!)

Now if you are using InDesign or are curious continue if not you may need to go to your program of choice to make sure everything goes right. Most programs use this same structure so you shouldn’t need to change much. We recommend Paperize.io but you can find other alternatives online, there are a few.

Step 4: Makin’ it

Now for the fun part (for designers), we make the cards! In the beginning, fight the urge to make it pretty. Just make it first, it need to be legible… and that’s about it right now. Eventually, it will need to be legible, logical, and beautiful but we’ll get there! Create a new document that is letter size (8.5”x11” or “regular paper size”) and then save it in your favorite spot with a proper name. Create a rectangle with a small black outline that is the size of your cards. Ours are euro poker size 63mm x 88mm. Now create text boxes and image placeholder boxes for all of your data types and arrange them to match your paper version.

Step 5: Makin’ It Go!

Now the magic! Go to window>utilities>data merge. This will open up a new window with the data merge tools. On the top right of the window click the hamburger menu and choose “select data source”. Find your CSV and choose it. Now all of your data columns will appear in the window and you can drag and drop them onto your placeholders! Once you’ve matched them all up to their correct places you can click the preview button on the bottom left to see what it looks like!

Step 6: Export Part Two – Electric Boogaloo

Now you will go to the hamburger menu on the data merge window again and select create the merged document. This will create all the variations from your sheet as cards! Things to check:
All records were chosen
Records per document > multiple records
Multiple record layout set the spacing between columns and rows to zero, makes cutting easier (unless your cards are not rectangular)
Once all your settings are set, click ok and watch it go! It should create a document filled with your beautiful (on the inside) cards!

Step 7: Export Part 3 – The Export Strikes Back

More exporting! Assuming all went well, and you had no errors (you can fix type overset errors by shrinking your font size or increasing your box size) now you gotta slap that export button one more time! File>export. The default is a pdf, set it to high-quality print (doesn’t REALLY matter) and hit export yet again. This will spit you out a PDF!

Step 8: Get Cutting

Get ready to make some card games! Print your pdf and get those scissors going!

Step 9: Enjoy!

Now play with your new cards, scratch out things write new things and update your sheet with your test findings. Pro-tip: keep these for the museum exhibit for the future museum dedicated to your card games!

Be sure to post your new cards on your social media accounts and check out our article if you would like tips on growing your card games on social media!