Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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!

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.

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

I tend to use HTML to create my prototypes in. I find that it's a pretty good medium for the purpose and there are plenty of developer tools around that makes it easy to work with. Plus it's easy to script.

How do you do PNG renderings? Printers have atight template/format requirements.

I've tried using webkit2png, but was never able to get it to render right: https://github.com/AdamN/python-webkit2png

Yeah, this. Or phantom.js is nice too. Or just use a plugin for your browser, that does a screen dump of the full page.

Also, I then do some afterprocessing in imagemagick.

When I must render a webpage to PNG, I use Phantomjs and a rasterize.js script. I've been very pleased with it, even when generating very large images (10,000px squared or more).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com