hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3893.txt

Episode: 3893
Title: HPR3893: Game card design resources
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3893/hpr3893.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 07:36:07

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3893 for Wednesday 5 July 2023.
Today's show is entitled Game Card Design Resources.
It is part of the series' tabletop gaming.
It is hosted by Klaatu and is about 38 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is How Design Card.
Hi everybody.
This is Klaatu.
Recently, a friend of mine asked me on MasterDone if I had any experience with making quote
game cards like Magic of the Gathering Close Quote.
So I've made a couple of games as a hobby.
I don't sell things in mass.
I've never approached a game store and asked them to carry my product or anything like
that.
So I'm not really the best person to comment on this kind of stuff, I guess, other than
the fact that I've done this as a hobby and I quite enjoy it.
So I do have thoughts about the process of making assets for games.
Now this question specifically was specified that it was going to be digital, not physical.
So it doesn't need to see print.
Which is good.
It's a thing.
It's not necessarily good or bad.
But it's a good qualifier.
So I figured in this episode I would talk about a couple of different aspects of what
one might think about if one was going to design gaming assets.
And I can kind of break it down into three major categories, which is just conceptual design
and resources, and I'll probably do it in that order.
But before I get into those thoughts.
I want to kind of preface it all with setting your own expectations or rather determining
what your expectations might be.
And I think, you know, if you don't stop to think about it and you think about it and
you just ask yourself really quickly the question, what do I want to get out of this?
Then I think the natural compulsion of most people engaging in any activity is, I want
it to be amazing.
That's just kind of like, since we're dreaming without any constraints, let's just say it's
going to be great.
Like it's going to be the greatest thing ever.
It'll be fun for me, it'll make an impact, it'll people will see it and they'll love
it.
They'll want to throw money at it, they'll, I'm not even selling it, they'll still give
me a million dollars.
Like it's going to be the most beautiful thing, people are going to write about it in magazines.
Like why not?
Like you can have anything at this stage.
And in reality, of course, that's probably not going to happen.
I mean, I guess it happens for somebody out there, like the lottery winner of popularity.
But I mean, generally speaking, it's not going to happen, right?
So we, you have to kind of set yourself or not set expectation, but really just kind
of set your target, really, to decide what it is exactly you are setting out to do.
Now I don't have a lot of information based on just a quick mastodon post.
Like I don't, I don't have a whole lot of background.
I don't know what the, the real goal is, I mean, the goal is to create some cards that
look like they're for games in a digital format.
That's all the information that I have.
I can imagine a lot of, of reasons someone might want to do this, might be for fun, it
might be because they want to program a video game, like a card based, you know, a deck building
game or some, some game like that.
So there's lots of different reasons that someone might be asking about this, but I don't
know the details.
And that's fine.
It doesn't matter.
For you, if you're thinking about, it would be fun to make a game.
Those are questions you'll have to ask yourself, what, what do you really want?
What, why are you doing this?
And more importantly, I guess, there is this famous triad of, of features you can expect
to have when you undertake any activity.
And that triad is, you can have time, you can have quality, or you can have affordability.
And what that means is that when you sit down to work on a project, it can take, you
can have it done quickly and affordably, but you're going to sacrifice on quality because
you've done things really, really fast and really, really cheap.
Or you could take a different tactic and sit down to do something and really optimize
on quality and on affordability, but that's going to take you a long time because you'll
have to craft everything that you need yourself and so on.
So in other words, you look at the triad of time, quality, money, and you pick two, but
you can't have all three.
It's a really good model to keep in mind for anything, I think, practically, but certainly
anything you do as a hobby like that.
That's a really, or really work projects.
It's a really good thing to keep in mind.
With that in mind, I will now talk about some of the core concepts when creating game assets.
When you're creating a game asset, it's often because you're creating a game and interestingly,
the first step in creating a game is often not creating the assets.
It's creating the mechanics and the mechanics are purely intellectual.
There are things that you just make up in your head and then you can even, I mean, you
shouldn't, but you, well, to some degree, you can, you can just kind of run them through
in your head.
You don't even need the physical objects.
So if you're thinking of a game and you think, well, okay, so what if there was a game
where I had a game card and who cares what it looks like, but it has the number two on
it.
Then someone else has a game card and it has the number four on it.
For whatever reason, I think I'm going to say that two beats four in this scenario.
The reason I'll do that is because I have another card in my hand that is an odd number.
Odd numbers give you a boost if you play them to your even numbered cards.
Yeah.
That'll work.
Okay.
So that's the game premise or whatever, you know, you just come up with the ideas, right?
And that's just happening up here in your head.
You don't have to have physical objects to represent that.
At some point, you want the physical objects to help you sort of keep it all straight.
To actually go through the motions because I think if you keep it completely purely mental
and intellectual exercise, you tend to skip things that happen in reality because it
all, you're just simulating reality in your mind's eye.
And so everything tends to work really well there because you only let the things that
work into that little simulated reality.
So if you take it out into the real world and start testing some of your thoughts, your
ideas, things tend to pop up that didn't come up in your imagination.
Now, one of the easiest ways to take a game idea into the real world are with existing
game assets.
So for instance, if you have a card deck, like some poker cards, then you could use that
to create a surprisingly complex game.
And those those cards have, if you think about it, quite a lot of data on them.
I mean, they've, they've all got numbers.
So you could use those to, to come up with just arbitrary values for your cards.
They all have a color, either red or their black.
They all have a suit, their aces or, they're not aces, diamonds, clubs, that's what I was
thinking.
No spades, spades, diamonds, clubs, and whatever the other one is, Clovers, something like
that.
I don't know.
Whatever cards are, I can't think of them right now.
But they all have, that you have four, four suits of cards and then possibly you have
other things as well.
I mean, you've got certainly the face cards, right?
You've got the Joker.
Well, no, the Jack, the King and the Queen, plus you've got two jokers.
So there's a lot, there's a little bit of variety there.
You can construct a lot of game scenarios with that alone, just a normal standard 52 deck
of cards that you get out of dollar store.
You can, you can get two decks of cards and combine them if you want.
And then you have more, more numbers than you did before because you have duplicates.
So if you're finding that you need more, just combine decks or just scale it down.
You want to simulate a hand where you have like a bunch of ones, some twos, and some other
threes.
Well, just grab those out of the deck and make a tiny little deck just for a specific scenario.
So that's one really easy, I mean, literally you can find decks of cards usually, well usually
just around, right?
I feel like a lot of people just end up with a deck of cards on accident.
If not, go to a dollar store, you'll get one for like literally a dollar or two dollars,
whatever, whatever the cheap amount of money is in the US now.
Here in New Zealand, I think you could probably get a deck of cards for two bucks.
So that's one resource to keep in mind.
That's, or it's a, it's a thing to keep in mind, right?
It is a resource, not for the final product, but for the process.
Other great resource during the development process are, it is tarot.
And I don't mean like give yourself a tarot reading to see if you're going to be successful
at game design.
I just mean like the tarot deck itself is a really, really useful game design tool because
it is like a poker card deck, playing card deck, except more of it.
Tarot card, I think probably partly because of its origin in like spiritualism and sort
of mythology, that sort of thing.
A lot of the tarot decks that you'll see, I mean, honestly every tarot deck I've ever seen,
they're just really beautifully done.
There's unique art on every single card.
That's like over, I don't, I forget, it's like something like 82 cards or something in
a tarot deck or something like that.
It's like a poker deck, but more of it and unique art on every single one.
So if you're, if you're looking to, to come up with mechanics with game mechanics and
you can find a great tarot decks on Etsy.com, just do a search for tarot.
You'll find a bunch of different ones and you can purchase one of them that you like.
One of them that inspires you or fits in with your sort of general style and then you
can take those cards and develop all kinds of mechanics because now you have art on every
single card.
So you don't have to just limit yourself to the suits of the card like, oh, is this
a sword or a pentacles or a cups or a coins or whatever, ones rather, or, or, but you
could also just say like, well, all of these cards have min on them and all these have
women on them.
So that'll be one faction and this will be the other faction or all of these cards have
birds on them and these have land animals.
So those will be my two factions or, you know, whatever.
So because of the diversity of like the art and the elements on each card, it's easy
to abstract those cards as assets and use them in the game that you're developing.
It's got a lot more data than just a poker deck.
It's got a lot of interesting things that you could kind of latch onto just temporarily.
And then in addition to that, I mean, they've got, you know, they got the numbered cards
with all of the suits, the swords, ones, pentacles and cups, but they also have the pentacles
or coins, but they also have the major arcana is what it's called.
Those are kind of like the face cards, but there's a lot more of them.
So it's things like, I don't know, Wheel of Fortune and the Hermit and the Fool and, you
know, the Emperor and all these sort of iconic sort of archetypes that again, you could
just use those as either maybe that's your game, maybe that's the structure of your game
or maybe those are the hero cards and all the other ones are support cards.
You, you can, again, the point is it's very flexible.
So you can, you can bend the tarot deck into whatever you're developing.
And then once you've developed everything and it's working and you're having fun with
this game, then you can start talking to yourself about creating the, the assets, the
cards themselves, the unique cards to your game, which brings me to the next segment,
which is design.
This is the, um, the actual how to part of the exercise.
I mean, if you're going to make game assets, you, you, you're going to have to touch a
graphics application.
And if you're not skilled at that, if you don't like literally have the skills for that,
and I'm not talking about like the comfort and the talent I'm talking about, like you,
you never had to use a graphic application for anything serious.
Then that can be a little bit difficult.
My go to graphic application is ink scape, which is a vector based drawing program.
And that can be a little bit complex.
I mean, it's surprisingly easy to learn.
Like, ink scape is, is shockingly.
And I've heard this resounding, I've, I've heard resoundingly from like everyone I've
ever met, like that they could, they, they eventually just figured out ink scape.
So it's a really, really great application.
That doesn't mean that it's quick and fast and easy to learn.
It just means eventually you can learn it.
So again, time, affordability, quality, you can do the quality and the affordability
on ink scape.
It will take time, you will have to spend a lot of time on that, but it is possible.
There are templates for cards available from thegamecrafter.com, that's thegamecrafterthegamecrafter.com.
They are a company that specializes in, in producing small run games, basically print
to order board games.
I use them all the time, they're a really great company, well, I don't know how they are
as a company.
They, they offer a really great service.
And one of the things that they offer, because they, they print things on demand are templates.
So if you go to, well, the gamecrafter.com and look around, you'll eventually find them,
but you can go directly to s3.amazonaws.com slash www.thegamecrafter.com slash templates slash
bridge-card.svg.
And there's other, other kinds, there's tarot-card SVG, there's poker-card, or maybe
not poker, maybe poker and bridge use the same spec.
I don't know, look around in the templates, you'll, you'll find an SVG file with just
like literally the, the page set correctly and then little lines on the, on the template,
so that you know how far it is safe for your text to, to go on the card.
Because on cards, because they cut them off of cardboard sheets and stuff, you're, you're
likely to accidentally get like the last half part of your word chopped off if you go straight
up to the edge.
So there are, there's a text safe zone that this template provides.
Now, if you're not printing, then you don't need to worry about that and you can just
do whatever you want.
I would still, I would never say never and, and even though you, you're telling yourself,
I'm going to do it digital today, you never know, maybe it would be useful to have print-safe
materials.
But anyway, there's a template, it's, there's not a whole lot to it.
But if you don't know inkscape, you don't know what an SVG is or you don't want to know,
then there's another option and this is not a bad option and I used to never recommend
this option.
I, in fact, I would recommend actively against this option and I don't know, then I
just kind of started using the thing at work and I realized it's kind of amazing.
LibreOffice Draw.
So LibreOffice, the open source office application has a, has the usual word processor spreadsheet
component.
It's got a, like a presentation component and so on.
But one of the things that it also has is an application called Draw, D-R-A-W and it
is a, it is an art, or a layout program, really.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't call it an art program.
It's more like a graphic layout program and you could use that to create cards with you,
the process is simple.
You open up LibreOffice Draw.
You go to page, page properties and set the size of your, of the page to 57 millimeters
by 89 millimeters for a bridge card.
You can look up the sizes of other cards, but bridge or is, I keep going back to bridge
because that's, I'm pretty darn sure, that's the size of magic the gathering.
So, or it's going to be approximately that big.
So 57 by 89, 57 millimeters by 89 millimeters is the card size, that's 2.25 by 3.5 inches.
You set your page size to that and now you have a card.
You were looking at a digital card.
It is blank right now.
And so then the process is to just start layering things onto it.
So you go get some artwork, what we'll get to that in the resources section.
You go get some artwork, you import it into, you insert the image onto the card and then
maybe you put a little box over the image and in the box you put some text like the name
of the card.
This is a knight in shining armor.
This is a space wizard.
This is a princess.
This is an orc or an ogre.
You label the card and then you give it some value.
So you want your orcs to hit hard but to be less resilient maybe because they're not
aren't, they're not wearing armor.
So you maybe give them a, I don't know, four strength and two toughness.
The knight in shining armor is well armored so maybe he has a four toughness and maybe
a three strength because he's not, he's not, he's just a human after all and so on.
So you put in numbers, you put in names and you know all the information that you want,
you write that on the card.
Now if your text is sort of getting eaten up by your artwork then yeah, you can put
in some background colors, just put a, you know, fill the text box in with some solid
color.
Modern design sensibility tends to stay away from like gradients and things like that.
So I would just use a flat design, just use solid colors, some text and some artwork.
Next thing you know, you've got a card.
Okay.
So that's LibreOfficeDraw.
You can export your, each card that you make, you make one card per page and then you just
export your entire document as a series of PNGs or JPEGs or whatever and or a PDF, whatever
you need it as and then now you've got digital cards.
You might want to design a card back as well if you're programming a game where people
need to see the back of the card but of course the back when you're programming the back
doesn't actually have to be, well it isn't, it's not part of that same file, I mean
it could be, you could do a sprite layout or something but I mean the, the back doesn't
have to like literally be the back of the card, right?
It's just a card, it's a graphic representing the back of the card and you put that on
your deck and then when someone quote unquote draws it, you move, you know, you, you just
make a new image of the, of the face up card so it's, it's not, it's not really literally
married to that file.
If you're printing the standard, you know, you're going to have like all the fronts of your
cards on a page and then you're going to have another page with just the backs and then
you're going to send that to the printer and you'll identify one as the front, one as
the back and they'll, they'll, they'll make sure that the, you know, that their printers
are printing one back on each sheet to one front on each sheet.
That's the design process, it's not really that hard.
I will say that one virtuous way of design thinking is minimalism.
So minimalism is a powerful, powerful tool for the unskilled graphic or unskilled artist
rather.
I feel like the graphic design is one thing, but like the art is another and I'll talk
about some sources of artwork and resources, which is the next section.
But for now, let's just assume that art is hard to get, right?
Like really good art that's consistent across a whole series of cards, that's, that's
tough.
Minimalism is your friend and very frequently for, for lots of reasons, it's minimalism
is your friend because it, it, it, it costs less time.
It might cost up front time to like come up with a design that you like without it looking
so basic that it makes you just embarrassed or it makes you not even think that it's a game
asset.
And generally, once you establish the pattern, if it is minimalism, then it's not going
to take that much time.
It's not going to take, you can get a high quality with minimal, minimalism because it's
minimal.
There's just not that many components to worry about.
So the things that you do have to create end up being high quality because there were
only a few of them.
And you can also, it's quite affordable for minimalism because if you just issue the idea
that you're going to just, that you, that you could spend thousands of dollars on custom
artwork and decide, I'm just going to use letters or public domain art.
You know, suddenly you've, you've, you've gotten a cheap, a cheap card that looks great
in some time.
Okay.
So minimalism is important and like to, to illustrate sort of the concept here, let's
assume that you've got this great idea for a game asset.
And in your mind's eye, because in your mind's eye, everything is amazing and perfect
and wonderful and groundbreaking.
In your mind's eye, you've got this card and there's the space wizard with a laser sword
on a, on the deck of a, of a space station.
And he looks amazing and, and you can just see it vividly in your mind and there's probably
some writing on there and some iconography to indicate his, his physical prowess as well
as his psychic strength, all the different things that space wizards have.
And you're really excited about this and then you realize one day that you don't have
any artwork of a space wizard.
And even if you tried to describe what you saw to an artist, you're not sure that you
would confidently know what to describe.
Like how would you, how do you get the art, how do you describe it to someone and get
the, the, the, the exact same thing?
So you decide, I'm going to go minimal.
So instead of having like a card with a space wizard and the laser sword and all the icons
and all these things, you decide.
You're going to grab a picture of a sword.
You're going to give it a glow effect in Gimp.
You're going to make it neon and then you're going to put it on a black background.
Now doesn't that look snazzy?
Of course it does.
Black is the new black.
You've got this cool looking sword that's glowing.
So now, hey, it's a laser sword, even though it looks like a medieval sword from, from
a free public domain website.
There it is.
It looks great.
And people will look at that and they'll think, wow, that is so stylish.
I think the, the designer was so bold in choosing this particular sword because, because
so many reasons, like obviously this is a reference to Alexander the Great's famous dream
of the glowing sword that he had before he went and defeated the, whoever he defeated.
You know, they'll, it will become its own thing, whether you want it to or not.
Like minimalism, that's the power of minimalism.
Well, one of the many powers of minimalism is that it inspires other people to fill in
the blanks that you couldn't be bothered to be explicit about.
So you do that and that's a lot easier to design than coming up with like the space wizard
art that you don't have and then finding room for all your icons and numbers and all the
important data that you have, that you just knew that had to be on the card somewhere.
But now you've got artwork and you can't see the data and so now you have to kind of move
things around.
Believe me.
Black background, glowy sword, put a bunch of numbers down the side, you're done.
You're done.
Maybe, maybe grab a couple of emojis, you know, like a shield emoji and a crossed sword
and emoji to represent like the physical prowess and the defense and then something else
like little brain wave icons, like an RSS feed icon for the psychic power.
You know, little, little icons down the side with some numbers by them.
You're done.
You've designed a card, do that 50 other times and you've got a whole deck of cards that
are ready to go to battle or whatever.
So minimalism is an important, important concept when you're home brewing your own game
assets, really embrace it, try to make it, try to get comfortable with it because it
just saves so much in every respect.
Okay, so new section resources.
This is unfortunately the most poultry section I have.
I have lots of thoughts about design and, you know, various cons, getting started, getting
started concepts, resources, I don't have that many of, at least I don't have that many
that are really, really useful.
So I do have some that are very useful, but I don't have as many as I would like.
So first of all, if we are embracing minimalism, you may as well go embrace free SVG, really.
It is a mess of just random public domain art or public domain slash creative comments
zero artwork.
It is stuff that people have scanned in from 1940s comics, it is stuff that people have
drawn themselves in in third grade.
It is a, it's all kinds of stuff and there's a lot of it.
Remember I said you could have quality, you could have affordability, you could have time.
Well free SVG is your time sink.
You will spend all of your time looking through S free SVG for work that is consistent enough
to look like it came from the same game, and it also that's, you know, that's sort of
high quality enough, like that works with your game, I guess, is really what I mean.
Because I mean, the quality is the quality, like that'll, once you find your, the common
thread, that's the quality you're using, right, because you just have to make sure that
the images look like they all came from the same game.
So if they look one way, then that's what you got.
So you grab a bunch of free SVGs from free SVG.org, download them, you put them on cards,
you've got your game.
That's, that's one way of doing it.
Now, like I say, you're going to take a lot of time doing that.
I made a game called Dark Occult, which was a revival of an old Kenneth Raman card game
from like the 80s called Dark Occults, and because the original game art was copywritten,
and I couldn't get in touch with Kenneth Raman, I did try.
I just went to free SVG and pulled a bunch of artwork, and it was all stuff that was
like, yeah, literally scanned in from, you know, random sources, like, mostly, like, I
think comic books from the 40s and 50s, like horror comic books, like, I can't think of
any of the names all of a sudden.
I literally own several of them, so I don't know why I can't think of their names.
Anyway, they're old.
They're horror comic books, and they're great, and they're super cheesy, and they're wonderful.
But I managed to grab, like, some artwork that felt kind of atmospheric to me, and I put
them on white cards, black ink, put the original text or callouts to the original text on
the bottom of the card, and that was it.
Like, I was done.
I made the card game.
It's done.
I play it all the time.
I love it.
It's literally one of my favorite games.
I mean, I'm not taking credit for the game design.
I didn't make the game.
I just re-implemented the cards, and it's all from free SVG.org.
That used to be OpenClipArt.org, by the way, is free SVG as sort of the successor of
OpenClipArt.
OpenClipArt went wonky.
So freeSVG.org is a great resource for, you know, if you're ready to embrace minimalism,
and if you have no expectation in terms of, like, the artwork that you're going to find.
Like, if you're looking for something specific, you're not going to find it on free SVG.
FreeSVG is about diving into a pool of lots and lots of stuff and just rummaging, rummaging
through it all.
Okay.
So that's freeSVG.org.
Another one.
Just as great, just as bad.
OpenGameArt.org.
OpenGameArt.org is very, very geared toward video games, and you have the same problem.
It's just a bunch of random stuff made by random people for random reasons, and for whatever
reason, they ended up putting it at OpenGameArt.org for anyone to use.
That's great except that you can't find anything consistent.
You will find a great looking sword icon that you'll think this will be perfect for my
digital card game, and then you'll think all I need now is a treasure chest.
That'll be easy, and you'll go and look for a treasure chest, and you won't be able
to find one except that one that's like eight pixels by eight pixels because someone
developed it ten years ago for an Nintendo Game Boy mod that they were doing.
So you won't find anything consistent, and then so you'll have to, what you'll end up
having to do is find all of the artwork within the realm of what you're looking for, and then
you'll have to find the common thread, and that will be the look of your game.
You didn't imagine your game to be a pixel art dungeon crawler.
Well, now it's a pixel art dungeon crawler because that's the art you could find.
It works.
It's just not, you feel the compromise as you're making it.
That said, it can work really well.
I made a game, a little card game, and I used, I think, eight different artworks from OpenGame.org,
and it worked brilliantly.
It was really nice.
It had a little bit of fantasy, a little bit of sci-fi.
It was just kind of one of those worlds where it was like, yeah, we got both.
We got cables and computers, and we got wizards doing scroll spells.
It's fine.
You just have to, the look and feel of your game gets determined for you.
Then I got two other resources that I think could actually be useful.
These are pretty good.
ArcMage is an open-source card game.
That is ArcMage, a-r-c-m-a-g-e.
You can find it at arcmage.org.
It's an amazing project.
They're working really hard at making a trading card game that is open-source.
Think Magic the Gathering, or I guess probably like Yu-Gi-O, or Pokemon, or something like
that.
It's open-source.
It's sort of a low fantasy setting, and it's an attack, your opponent kind of card game,
where you build up a little army in your deck, and you figure out what attacks, what, and
so on.
It's a really, really, very cool little card game.
I have two boxes of it.
I ordered them and had them shipped all the way to New Zealand, which was not cheap, but
I really, really wanted to support the project, and it's just a really, really, it's really
cool.
It is a neat project.
I'm really super glad to have two card sets from it, and you know, you look at it and
you're just thinking, well, this is open-source, where do they source their art?
And they source their art from lots of different places, but they do it in such a way that
it mostly looks consistent, and it is all open-source artwork.
So you could borrow the artwork for your own game assets, arcmage.org.
Some of it comes from Battle for Westnoth, the strategy video game, others, other things,
they've just obtained permission to use it under a Creative Commons license.
I think some is probably drawn specifically for the game.
It's just, it's a lot of art assets that you could feasibly use.
Go to arcmage.org slash artwork, and you'll find all of the images that they have, or
you'll find a link, rather, to all the images that they have.
And there's, you know, there's, it's a mix, it's like low fantasy, so there's some sort
of things that would be suggestive of like, wizardry and fairies and things like that,
but there's a lot of just sort of generic medieval stuff as well.
But it's mostly consistent in look, but I mean, it is a certain look, right?
I mean, it, it, again, you're, there's a compromise being made here.
You're saying, okay, well, I'm going to use art that looks like this, but I mean,
that's without, without, without commissioning art, like that's a compromise that you're
going to be making.
The other resource with art pre-existing is my own game on GitLab.com slash not clatu slash
petition dash card game that's petition P E T I T I O N dash card dash game on GitLab.com
slash not clatu.
This is a card game that I developed a couple of years ago and commissioned artwork for
and then released the art into creative commons.
So, and it was all done with open source software, created specifically.
So it's a bunch of art.
I mean, it's, it's a bunch of medieval looking people, a couple of fantasy-ish, like there's
like sort of a goblin slash, I don't know what would be like orc maybe, or really a goblin.
I think there's a swamp creature.
You know, there's, there's like some things that are like, oh, that's fantasy.
But mostly it's, again, low fantasy, like a lot of medieval type of stuff.
Not very dynamic.
I, I realized well after commissioning the art that, as an art, the art ordering itself
is a, is a skill and you don't really think about that.
But being able to describe, again, kind of like a dynamic pose and really making sure
that your cards have, have action-oriented things happening on them rather than just,
just, they just all look like portraits, though that's, that's a skill that I didn't have
at the time.
So if I ever get to order art again, then I'll, I'll be sure to be a little bit more dynamic
about my art orders.
Well, no, and actually, you know what I have ordered art since then and, and I did.
I, I learned my lesson.
I had a lot more dynamic poses later on, but those weren't for cards, those were, for
like books and things.
So anyway, that's something that's free to use as well and creative commons get lab.com
slash not clattu slash petition dash card dash game and those, so arc mage and petition
are the kind of the two sources of like, here's a bunch of consistent art.
Both happen to be low fantasy.
You could feasibly use them.
They exist.
And then after that, there's just little long shots.
There's artstation.com, there's deviantart.com, both of those specialized in giving sort
of a home to artists, but there's really not a, a huge culture of like creative commons.
I mean, art station, I think, even less.
So like, I don't even know if there are creative commons assets on there at all.
That's not true.
I know that there are some not a lot, though, deviantart.com, I feel has gotten less focused on creative
commons over the years.
I could be making that up.
That's just my impression.
There's a lot of stuff on there.
And so once again, you're just going to have to, you, you, it would just be looking through
a bunch of things, hoping to find something that looks vaguely similar enough to something
else to think, yeah, this could come from the same game.
Yeah, sure, that'll work.
It's difficult.
The, the other like obvious option, possibly, is, you know, any of the online art generation
things that are happening right now, like, what is it mid-journey or something like that?
Like, I've seen several books lately that, that have come out for role-playing and, and
they just say, like, right on the book, like this, this book contains artwork generated
by AI.
And that's, that's their art credit, you know, and I don't know, like, that seems like
it's going to be a, that's definitely a developing thing, right?
I mean, like, is that a real option for, for, for, for what you're doing?
I don't know.
Like, it is something that might be an option.
It may not be.
And, and I don't think, like, I think the, the, the really good renders, I think are going
to cost money.
I don't think they're going to be the ones that you just type into a search engine, you
know, how, how I make free art with AI.
Like, I think, so I think there's going to still be a cost associated with that.
And then there's, there's the whole question of, like, well, if I'm going to an AI for
art, am I robbing an artist of a paycheck or something?
And I don't know.
Are you, I mean, like, how much would you pay an artist if you weren't paying an AI?
Probably you're, you're, you know, I don't know.
The, the, you'd have to look at the cost benefit analysis and then whether you want to support
a computer or support a person, it's, it's a, it's a big question mark.
Nobody, nobody knows how this works yet.
I don't think.
So, I mean, people know how things work.
I'm saying, I don't know that anybody's really comfortable with, like, sort of how we're
all, like, what, what is this market?
Like, what, what is this exactly where the AI isn't obviously generating art just from
its own imagination, because it doesn't have an imagination, it's a computer.
So it's, it's, it's basing it off of artwork online.
How do you feel about that and so on?
So lots of big philosophical questions there.
And then you have to temper those philosophical questions with, like, the reality of, like,
well, look, all I want to do is make a cool looking art work card.
Like, that's, that's my goal.
Like, what, how am I going to do that?
I don't know.
I have only commissioned artists who use open source tooling and who are willing to release
into Creative Commons.
That's, that's the line that I've drawn so far, but they're hard to find.
It's like really hard to find as someone who specifically uses open source tooling and
is willing to release into Creative Commons.
Like, those are just, sometimes you can find one, not the other, sometimes you can't
find either.
And then you have to pay, you know, like, and you're not making any money off of the
thing probably.
It's, it's tough.
It is tough.
I mean, it's no, it's no tougher than it's ever been.
Like, these are all questions that creators, content creators have asked themselves since
forever.
It's just the specifics are a little bit different.
So I don't know.
Hopefully, some of that is useful there.
It meets the brief and the brief was, do you have thoughts about creating game assets?
I did.
I have provided them here.
Hopefully they were useful or insightful or informative or made for a good half hour
of listening.
And you record a show about something that you're interested in.
Thanks for listening.
Talk to you next time.
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