
Paperize – Beautiful Card Game Prototypes - Rabidgremlin
http://oilandrope.com/paperize/beta
======
JoeAltmaier
I use GIMP scripts for this. Instead of spreadsheet, just a call with
arguments separated by commas like this:

    
    
      (UrNammu-new-craftsman 1 "2Baubles.png" "Fleece the Tourist" "Got his pants! Gain 2 Baubles"  "Google Images")
    

We print using thegamecrafter.com, which is a little struggle because our
decks have 100+ cards, and they require EACH CARD to be 'proofed' by hand on
their laggy webpage. Proofing 1 card is enough for our software-generated
cards, they all align exactly the same vs the template.

~~~
lorennorman
This is impressive, I keep meaning to learn to script Gimp and Inkscape,
sometimes I think web apps are the only way I can think anymore...

Great point about thegamecrafter, we had the same problem. We want to try
their API though, as Paperize could dump entire prototypes in there at once.
Makes it a lot easier on your playtesters, too!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
You've gone a long way, putting it on a web page. Doing it 'by hand' doesn't
help anybody but us. I've been thinking about doing what you're doing; I'm
just glad you're doing it!

Hey, if you could automate 'proofing' cards while you're dumping to
thegamecrafter, that would be wonderful.

~~~
lorennorman
What I keep imagining is managing hex and square tiles this way...

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Red_Tarsius
Very interesting! However, I think the landing page should be clearer. No
customer watches a 9:00 minutes video of a product, no matter how good it is.
I'd switch to a 30 seconds promo ( _who are we? Why do you need us?_ ) and
keep the longer one for users who already know the product – they are hooked –
and look for the nitty-gritty details.

~~~
codewithcheese
I don't totally disagree but I watched about 6 mins, until I got the general
idea, and I have never considered making a card game before.

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diggum
Me, too. Now I'm pondering card game ideas!

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lorennorman
Yes! That's what's fun, now you can easily imagine a re-skin of all kinds of
simple games, just go find some fun graphics on the web and click "print".

I want to get an interface going on mobile so you can just snap pictures with
your phone to add card art on the fly.

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kenbellows
I really love this concept and it looks really well executed. One thing I
think would be really slick would be to live update the template as you pair
columns with locations on the card, using the first row from the CSV for
content in the preview

~~~
lorennorman
Thank you!

That feature is definitely on the short list, we have lots to do in terms of
surfacing the data in the designs in a more "live" fashion.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'd like to see special symbols rendered in the text flow - e.g. power points
icon with a number superimposed. Like "The flug hit you for
<hiticon>5</hiticon> pts damage"

~~~
lorennorman
Guaranteed to happen.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Hard in gimp - text layout is not directly available as a method separate from
fonts. And fonts cant do color in Gimp. So have to parse text, look for tags,
insert icons, do your own word wrap etc. All in Lisp. Yuck.

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jgoewert
I already submitted the survey, then on my drive home thought "Did it have a
tuckbox creator/generator? I don't think I saw that in the video."

~~~
lorennorman
It does not... yet! I'll add it to the feature requests we're weighing.

Anything else you wish we had templates for?

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bduerst
I would love to try it - when does Beta open?

Edit: Nevermind. I was able to use it :)

FYI, you get a csrf error when logging in with a google account.

~~~
lorennorman
We hope to start inviting early adopters in in March to do final tweaking and
load testing. We'll probably go to beta invites as soon as we think it's
stable and useful. From there, it goes where the users take us!

Right now the only way to be considered for early access is to fill out our
feedback form:
[https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1pGhxa1NvBmqVvV4tPt0YTiUcDRx...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1pGhxa1NvBmqVvV4tPt0YTiUcDRxMfaj8QHHoS1mIOsA/viewform)

~~~
bduerst
Yep, I submitted my email address. It's great stuff.

Would be amazing if you had a Cards Against Humanity template too. We have an
info set we're looking to print for our own personal use, but I can't seem to
find a good template gen and don't have the time to learn gimp commands.

~~~
lorennorman
We were wondering if we were going to get any CAH requests. That's an easy
thing for us to do, we just weren't sure about letting the product turn into
that instead of a serious design tool.

Then again what does "serious" even mean.

~~~
bduerst
I think CAH is probably some low-hanging fruit to at least get people to your
site (though I'm probably bias because I am looking for it), but your the real
differentiator is that you support full templates. Just keep advertising it as
is.

Custom templates would be rad too.

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woebtz
Beautiful tool!

Something seems unfinished with the column-to-position associations. Maybe
they need some more style to communicate the purpose a bit clearer? (e.g.
representing the columns-to-positions in a table style, or more vertical
padding separation, or referencing positions by letter (A, B, C, etc.) instead
of by #).

~~~
lorennorman
We would agree. The UI itself is still evolving rapidly, the core
functionality just finally came together and got useful. Ideally, we get
feedback during this process that helps us nail down the most important
workflows and give it a serious UX paint job.

~~~
kenbellows
That particular feature seems sort of backwards to me; might just be me, but I
think it might be more straightforward to list the places you can put things
on the template and have a <select> allowing you to pick columns from your CSV
for each spot (default to nothing in a spot)

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strict9
Very disappointing to hit a landing pages with video that only collects email
addresses.

~~~
lorennorman
Sorry to disappoint! We didn't post this to HN, but I can see how the title
here is misleading.

~~~
Rabidgremlin
Oops... I posted it because I thought it was a great idea/presso/product and
the HN community would be a good place to get feedback from. Apologies if it
was premature!

~~~
lorennorman
Not at all and thank you so much!

~~~
Rabidgremlin
No problem. You could always bump me up the early access list in return :)

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matthuggins
Not relevant to the tool, but he kept saying in the video that the game has 16
cards even though he proceeded to create 17 cards (5 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 +
2).

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rjurney
Way to go Loren, the people have spoken and they like it!

~~~
lorennorman
Does nothing for my imposter syndrome, unfortunately!

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jldugger
So at this point, you're basically ready to pirate M:tG and Netrunner ;)

~~~
lorennorman
Yeah, that's pretty easy now, I suppose. Totally not the goal, nor a behavior
we'd encourage!

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rikkus
Nice clean app design. What are you using to render PDFs?

~~~
lorennorman
Right now it is Prawn[0]. It slowly evolved from a script a year ago, where it
was fine. We are considering switching to an HTML->PDF workflow, though, since
I have to render all of this stuff in the web for quicker previews anyway!

Thanks for the clean design mention, we owe it mostly to Zurb Foundation[1].
Using those modal popovers to control the user's attention has really helped
me narrow the UI variables.

0: [http://prawnpdf.org](http://prawnpdf.org) 1:
[http://foundation.zurb.com](http://foundation.zurb.com)

~~~
patio11
Stick with Prawn, as it is sanity saving for this task. For web based
previews, use GraphicsMagick and Postscript to turn the PDF into a gif or
image. One command line, takes half a second. Saves you from doing CSS hell on
layout, where the preview pixel wise matching the print data really matters
for your app.

~~~
lorennorman
Thanks for the tip, Patrick! I had heard the html->pdf tools were pretty good,
but you're absolutely right about the pixel precision needs. I got my Prawn
setup into a reasonable state pretty early, and it's be Mostly Fine, Just
Fine.

