Universal Card Game Version 1.5
Hello everyone! This is Jeff with Starcat Products, and I am very pleased to announce the final version of the Universal Card Game. This will be the last time I will refer to the game in terms of versions, as we have been working on this game for several years. While each time we revise the game it gets much better, there is only so much that you can do before people start losing interest. I really appreciate everyone that has stuck with us all this time and especially putting up with all the different changes. This final version of the game is the product of input from the several playtest sessions that many of you may have seen on our Facebook page.
One of the main changes that we are making to the game is the layout of the cards. The card frame, as we call it, was created literally with filters from Photoshop and with an attempt to recreate the back of a Yu-Gi-Oh! card. The card was created in a color profile that was only optimized for computer screens and other digital formats. If you have ever seen any of the printed versions of the cards, you will very quickly notice that the cards are printed super dark. We commissioned a professional designer to create new layouts for the cards based off the design templates I used to create the older versions of the game. It really did not help that the card frames were created with little to no designer input from the beginning so there were additional issues.
One major issue with the card’s older layout was the detail of the textures on each card. You can really tell that I made the Shadow Master and Pitfall Effect card frames much later in the game, because there is much more detail on those card frames than any of the other card types. This was because in design there is a setting called “dots per inch” (DPI) which basically determines the print quality of an image when it is transferred to a physical media. The older card frame had a low DPI which when printed, created poor quality cards. You can clearly this in my examples below; the image on the left is the computer based image and the one on the right is what the card would look like when it is printed by a print shop.
Another major issue is the size of all the fonts on each card. During several playtest sessions we have had players state that the cards were very difficult to read. This was due to many of the cards having helper text, such as cards that have the Support abilities and cards such as the Epic Character’s Epic Condition. These abilities make the font size fun, as low as 5pts! To give you the idea of that scale, the Starcat Website uses a 10pt font which is about double the value. Below are two cards that have examples of this shortened type style and how the abilities are now separated with a horizontal line to help players differentiate abilities or other costs associated with a card.
I am going to try to start writing these at least once a week to give a progress report to everyone. As always we thank you for your patience with this project and we hope to have it perfect soon.
Jeff the Card Critic