Car cards!

[dreadnaut]

Because there are never enough ideas mid-flight! It's all because I re-discovered this old post by Duplode:

Thanks God, I don't have to make that "Vehicle data" section.

I wonder about which data to include. For the purposes I have in mind it would be nice to summarize the key features in a way that wouldn't take half a screen per car. For instance, one unoriginal idea would be a NFS-style bar chart with acceleration, handling and so on, plus a few icons for things like PG...

The first thought was of course "that would be cool!", because in my mind I was looking at actual printed cards, like collectable ones, with the Stunts cars!

Now, actually printing them might be going too far, but let's say we had the space of a playing card, back and front, how would you showcase a car? What would the bars on the chart be? Let's say there's space for five. Maximum speed? Performance on different terrains? Magic-carpet-ness? Which icons do we need? Anti-, flexible-, powergear?

How do you see these cards? how about your Paint skills?

[Cas]

Oh!  I remember when I was at primary school, some card sets were popular called "Súper Triunfo". This brand included card sets such as "planes", "helicopters", "motorbikes" and "cars". Other brands would make similar cards with super-hero themes and the sort. The way you would play is that the cards were shuffled and each player would get the same amount. You would look at the front card in your deck and pick one of the the attributes, say "max speed", because you thought that particular vehicle was specially good at that. Then you'd call "Speed: 200". The other kids would check the speed attribute in their cards and the one who had the greatest one would take all cards, put them at the end of his deck and continue with his own front card until only one player with cards remained

I'd go for top speed, acceleration (or time from zero to top speed on a straight paved road), number of gears, length (of the car), grip (which unit, not sure) and breaks (also not sure which unit). This, if it were for cards like the ones I described. Now, if it's just to have the most important information, booleans and discrete attributes such as power-gear, creator (or original), etc., would be more significant than some of the ones I listed before.

In the wiki, I tried to create pages for some cars and I realised I didn't know how to add or remove attributes from templates or to make some cars have some attributes that other do not. If I understood templates better, I'd be glad to help in creating such pages.

[Overdrijf]

This could be a cool idea.

A bit of a problem is which stats make sense. What what we use for instance to give a grip on handling?
We do have some numbers on the wiki that might be a good start. As an example the stat block from the kart:

Max horsepower (est.):   90HP
Transmission:   6-speed
0-60mph:   2.9s
0-100mph:   5.6s
Half mile:   16.70s
Flat track top speed:   154mph
Real top speed :   156mph

If every number is superimposed over some sort of bar graph where the maximum length of the bar is the best value available (or probably even better the best value available on an original car, so we don't have to redo stuff when someone releases a new cheat car), that would give both the relevant precise number and a feeling of how it compares to the rest of the stunts world. I'm not sure what the minimum length of the bar would be for things like 0-60 seconds. Maybe calibrate it such that the slowest original car sit around 10% of the bar filled, or higher if that looks better? And just roll with a linear relation from there on?

On top of that we could do things like (ingame) car length. Not sure if that adds a lot. (EDIT: Although it's a good indicator of magic carpet-ness and jump length, so I changed my mind, add car length.) A good stat for grip would definitely be nice. My own attempts to come up with something for the purpose of car development have failed, the relation between the corner grip stat and the car length is complex. If we do come up with a good number the addition of a second bar for terrain grip (sand road) would be an easy addition. We could ditch up to two of the acceleration stats to make room if needed.

Edit: After reading Cas' post again: brakes are a pretty simple internal number. Doesn't interact with mass or anything. I'm sure we can figure out a way to transform that into a real world number, maybe with some tests on brake road length at a certain speed for several values of the stat.

I'd also like to get the acceleration curve Stunts renders for every car in there, maybe as part of the picture somehow?

I'm also unsure of how the pictures should look. Plain side view like on Zakstunts? Diagonally from the top-front-left as an action pose, posed with Stressed for high resolution and good details? Or an actual ingame action shot, cool looking but low res?

I have no idea what these cards would ever be used for, but they might look cool. I'll see if I can do a WIP concept this week, to get a handle on how ugly it might look.

[Cas]

It could be high-res from stressed on a high-res background drawn to resemble the track and maybe a gas station behind or something. I like it in presentation pose, like you described

[Overdrijf]

I did some test shopping, this could end up looking kind of cool.

See this as mostly a layout and visual content test. For example: I completely forgot again that I was now in favor of car length when it was time to write some example stats.

Card sized version:

Click here for full detail version, somewhat larger.

I thought it might be nice to have a picture of the real life car on there somewhere, not sure how I feel about that now, it kind of clashes with the style of everything else. I also added the ingame acceleration graph. I added number of gears and type of power gear as symbols. For regular, bug-free and anti-power gear cars the symbol is relatively subdued. The symbol should get bigger if the car has power gear, maybe a star shape with a larger letter (or two) in it, and maybe glow or something. I went with a way to be able to base both bar length and bar color on the stats. The lowest stats are blue, the highest stats pretty reddish. Anything that goes over the best or highest original stat becomes even redder and when high enough runs off the card. As you can see I didn't fill in everything yet, I figured this gave a pretty good idea of my concept for this. (I do notice that the black doesn't stand out enough when not super zoomed in. Maybe a different text color? White or something? Black with a white outline is unreadable on a screen but might work in print?) The color of the borders on this one is based on the color of (the primary paint job of) the car. I didn't have a great idea for the filling in of the main text field, but the lone piece of banked road I used in the action picture looked pretty good there, so I left it in for this test version. There might be a good idea connected to it somehow. Speaking of the picture: I composited it of a Stressed shot of the car and that of a banked road. I manually added detail to the banked road because I couldn't take a large enough screenshot. I also touched up the car a bit in those places where the model is a little rough, some white background was shining through the cracks between a few panels, for instance. The main image of the car does not get bigger than this unless A) I lower the quality or B) I use a bigger screen to make the Stressed screenshots or C) I use a different program for taking the pictures. I went with "bridge size" cards, which are the most common kind at least in Europe and the easiest to get printed if someone were ever to take this all the way. It also seemed quite a good format for something that would have a list of stats on it. "Poker size" is a little wider, tarot size is quite a bit bigger overall. For the font I used what I had open from my last project (Arial Nova Bold). I liked how it looked, and I figured someone else would be a bigger font geek than me and know the perfect Stunts font.

Those are I think most of my thoughts on this for now.




Edit several weeks later: I now think that the stats should be about things like power gear, magic carpets, phazing through objects, stuff like that. If we just do things like top speed they're regular car cards, not Stunts cards. It's going to be a bit of a challenge to find proper ways to quantify these things.

[Cas]

Great work, Overdrijf!  About the real picture of the actual car, only problem would be that some custom cars may have no real counterpart.

Some pictures for you guys to see the cards I was talking about before. I had superhero ones and I had a motorbike set, but not the one in the picture:

[CTG]

As far as I remember, we had a conversation about that in 2012 +/- 2 years. Or maybe Stunts pipsqueak cards. Memories fade away.

Edit: found it!!!

Probably you all know the games with truck / racing car / airplane / etc. cards, competing in HP, top speed, length, weight, whatever. It would be fun to make Stunts pipsqueak cards (number of races, victories, forum messages, WSM participations...)

[dreadnaut]

Wait, was there actually an Ikarus card? Was it a racing bus?

[Overdrijf]

You know, to dig this topic up again, maybe in addition to or instead of car cards we should have trick cards, to help newer drivers literally build up a book of tricks. Anything non-obvious, like running through a slalom block, speedups from highways/halfpipes etc. Take the recent ZCT215 Watetris. There’s a loop, followed by a cork up/down. That combination means you can do an outside loopcut into invisibridge, but I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t (re?)learned the outside loopcut in ZCT206 Relativistic (which paid off when I used it to great effect in ZCT214 Accuracy) and if I hadn’t picked up the invisibridge in ZCT210 Lynx. On the one hand it’s a lot of fun to learn these things on the go and surprise people by using them, on the other hand it might raise the level of competition if more people have the tools to come up with the right trick to use. (Note: this post was made before the hidden replays were published. I currently have no idea is the trick described in this paragraph led to a dirty victory or was valiantly defended against. I'm guessing that second one.)

There could be an image of the trick being performed, from whichever camera makes it clearest (maybe even a short animated GIF since these are for now digital cards anyway?) and then maybe some text like:
Trick: Outside Loopcut
Element: Loop
Execution: Wrap around the outside edge of a loop to launch your car far to the right of where a normal jump could take you, including straight ahead.
Properties: Shortcut, Speedup, Jumpcut, Big Air
Risks: Twist around too far and you crash upon landing.

The cars might be better off with a similar format as well, where we forget about having stats and numbers and just try to write the best driving advice, like how some cars are faster when sliding around the corner, or how they have a bonus on dirt and ice elements, or how they have a large gap between flat road and real top speed and can benefit from lots of speedups, or their width is small making them good for stunts like inside loopcuts, or they have an exceptionally short/long jump length, or…

Something like:
Car: Porsche March Indy
Categories: Fast, Flexible Powergear, Original
Pros: Fastest car in the game, best handling, powergear accessible by driving into a loop in top gear
Cons: None
Best use: Tracks where powergear is hard to reach, or where a powergear section is intercut with tricky turns

Basically, you look at a track, see certain properties of the track, and start flipping through your cars and tricks looking for which one can do something with those. Like the more experienced drivers already do, except you don’t need to have it memorized (or read the wiki).

As for the making process, we should get specialists/experts to write them. You can write the card for a car if you’ve ever won a race with it.

[dreadnaut]

Mmmh, I wonder if this connects to the driving school ideas

[Overdrijf]

Mmmh, I wonder if this connects to the driving school ideas

Yeah, probably. On the one hand a full video tutorial would be more helpful in learning a trick, on the other hand a webpage full of quick-start guides with as little text and pictures as possible would be better for quickly finding the trick you need. And if we streamline the process a bit it might be less work to make.

As a bonus, my concept art of this card format looks better than my previous attempt too.



(This card made possible by lenticular printing.)

(Also, I'm just missing the space to say that that extra one usually only works when jumping on, driving into the middle of the barrier will usually just crash you. Cards are small.)

[Overdrijf]

You know what, I'm just going to do it, car cards. (I'm saving the tricks for a potential second series.)

I will be shopping the cards together based on text and preferably also a picture people provide. If you figure you know how to use a car, you can write the card. But first things first, I want input on the design to turn the current concept into something we can all agree on.

Here is my concept design:


The stuff I need input on (you can address as few or as many as you like):

Text: Is this the right amount of text? Are these the right categories/paragraphs? The idea is that every car will get its information shoved into the same categories, so they should work for every car. Are top speed and acceleration really important enough to list them like this? Are the titles of the categories okay? Is this a format in which you can convey how to drive a car, at least well enough that people can start practicing?

For easy reference, this is roughly the amount of text that fits into this format:
Top speed: 154/156mph

0-60/100: 2.9/5.6s

Properties: Fast, Custom, Short,
6-speed

Tips: The Superkart can take a large
corner at top speed. It is prone to
magic carpets. It is great for inside
loopcuts due to its small width. It can
be tempting to use automatic gears,
but the brakes are strong, shifting
down slows you down more precise.

Best use: Tracks with lots of corners
and few straights.

Properties: What are all the properties a car can have? Fast, Slow (both about cornering and feel, if the numbers for top speed and acceleration stay separate, maybe name them differently to clarify that?), Medium-Fast? (For cars like the F40 and LWT ZR1-GT3 maybe? Or just don't list them as either slow or fast?) Rigid Powergear, Flexible Powergear, Anti-Powergear, How do you call what the Speedgate has, First Gear Powergear?, Short, Long, 6-speed, Original, Custom, Wide?, What's a good word for not wide? anything else?

Text formatting: What do you think about the size, font (current font is Arial Nova Bold), distance between lines etc?

Colors: I'd like to stick to the Stunts ingame Palette, agreed? That would be these colors:


Outer line color: I'd like to do something with this. I was thinking, maybe have different colors for fast and slow and powergear cars? Something like that, so it reflects certain categories? Otherwise we could use one of the series of related colors to show a gradient, lighter=faster or something? Or just match it to the car's color? EDIT: Oh, oh, we could make it a difficulty rating, how hard is this car to master? It wouldn't be spelled out on the card, because that's discouraging, but there's still an automatic omnious vibe from a red or black card. Probably have 3 or 4 steps. Something straightforward like the Jaguar is easy, something like the Vette (poor cornering combined with rigid powergear, 6 gears) is hard.

Extra outer line: Should there be a "fake printed card" white border with rounded corners around the card? I'm leaning towards no.

Fill for text space: I don't like completely white, I do kind of like taking one color from the picture and letting it run through like this (it looks a little weird, but also kind of cool) but I'm certainly open to other suggestions and variations.

Picture: My idea is to have a single non-animated picture. A screenshot from outside the car, stretched from 320x200 to 640X480 (but oldschool pixelated stretching, no mixing colors), the way the game was meant to be viewed. There should not be a replay bar or dashboard in the picture. Minor modifications are allowed (I can do those) to remove things like the "replay" text or the mouse or to make details like Crashper's face above look better. The picture is best if the car, in its iconic primary paint scheme, looks really big in it (my example is a really small car the zoom doesn't go any closer), if the situation portrayed fits the car (the kart in a corner, the Lancia on dirt or ice, the Indy in a huge jump...) and bonus points for style if it's a picture from some sort of historic replay (the one above is from Renato Biker winning ZCT131, a race with almost all karts, on a track designed by the designer of the kart (a cool guy by the way, that designer)).

Method of distribution: I can just pack the pictures up as a combined zip, that would be the easiest option. But if anyone has any fancier ideas like a website or an actual trading game where you have to earn cards off of other pipsqueaks or earn one per race you join or something I'm listening.

Anything else? Major stuff I'm forgetting?

(The card above is an example, the information isn't super thought out yet. Advising against the automatic gear for instance is a bit of a mixed bag. But feedback is welcome if you have it...)

[Duplode]

Great! Here go my initial 2¢:

Text: Is this the right amount of text?

You might want to consider using less text for the "Tips" section, while keeping the same amount of information. A more telegrammatic style might do:

Tips: Can take large corners at top speed. Prone to magic carpets. Great for inside loopcuts due to its narrowness. Though auto gears are tempting, slowing down by downshifting can be more precise than using the strong brakes.

This would allow either enlarging the font size or increasing the form factor.

(On form factors: your sample card has, approximately, golden ratio proportions, 1 : Phi~=1.618. For the sake of comparison, Magic cards are 63 x 88 mm, 1 : 1.397. If you like the allure of the golden number, it is worth noting that 2-1/Phi ~= 1.382 .)

Are top speed and acceleration really important enough to list them like this?

Most definitely! I can't conceive a Super Trunfo card without top speed or acceleration 

(I presume the two top speed values are straight line and real, right? In that case, I feel it would look a little tidier to use "154 mph (156 mph)" instead of "154/156 mph", but I don't have a strong rationale for my preference.)   

Are the titles of the categories okay?

I would perhaps have "Best fit" or "Fits well" instead of "Best use", but that's really minor.

What are all the properties a car can have? Fast, Slow (both about cornering and feel, if the numbers for top speed and acceleration stay separate, maybe name them differently to clarify that?), Medium-Fast? (For cars like the F40 and LWT ZR1-GT3 maybe? Or just don't list them as either slow or fast?)

Some of what we mean when we say "fast car" or "slow car" is conveyed by top speed and acceleration, so I think it would be better to focus on handling when it comes to translating that to  a property. There might be a "high grip" property that indicates a car has high grip relative to its straight line performance . The opposite property, "low grip", might be applied to the moderately fast cars in which the lack of grip is most acutely felt (GTO, Countach, GT3, etc.). There possibly also is a place for superlatives ("very high grip"). "Nimble" for the cars that have better than usual handling due to being short (Audi, Lancia, Kart, etc.) might make sense as a separate property, though it does overlap with "Short".

How do you call what the Speedgate has, First Gear Powergear?

I don't think there is an established name yet. "First Gear Powergear" sounds appropriate.

What's a good word for not wide?

I'd say "narrow".

anything else?

An important one is "Off-road", for the cars with better than usual handling on non-asphalt terrain (LM002, Melange, Lotus).

Text formatting: What do you think about the size, font (current font is Arial Nova Bold), distance between lines etc?

There probably is a nicer font than Arial, though I'm bad with picking fonts and would have to research before giving an useful suggestion. The vertical spacing between the lines in the "Tips" feels a bit too small; shortening the text, as suggested above, might help.

Outer line color: I'd like to do something with this. I was thinking, maybe have different colors for fast and slow and powergear cars? Something like that, so it reflects certain categories? Otherwise we could use one of the series of related colors to show a gradient, lighter=faster or something? Or just match it to the car's color? EDIT: Oh, oh, we could make it a difficulty rating, how hard is this car to master? It wouldn't be spelled out on the card, because that's discouraging, but there's still an automatic omnious vibe from a red or black card. Probably have 3 or 4 steps. Something straightforward like the Jaguar is easy, something like the Vette (poor cornering combined with rigid powergear, 6 gears) is hard.

Colours for categories is perhaps a little more in line with TCG tradition; still, I like both ideas. One way of combining them that might work would be using a star rating on the top of the card to suggest difficulty (it would be akin to a mana cost in a TCG, with a high rating conveying "this is costly/complex/difficult to pull off, bu the payoff can be fearsome").

Fill for text space: I don't like completely white, I do kind of like taking one color from the picture and letting it run through like this (it looks a little weird, but also kind of cool) but I'm certainly open to other suggestions and variations.

I think it is important not to use contrasting colours for the background of the main text box, for the sake of readability. Different shades of the same colour, on the other hand, might be fine. One thing I can envision is picking an image (it could be a single one for all cards, or something car-specific like a detail from the dashboard) and tinting it monochrome with the card background colour. 

Picture: My idea is to have a single non-animated picture. A screenshot from outside the car, stretched from 320x200 to 640X480 (but oldschool pixelated stretching, no mixing colors), the way the game was meant to be viewed. There should not be a replay bar or dashboard in the picture. Minor modifications are allowed (I can do those) to remove things like the "replay" text or the mouse or to make details like Crashper's face above look better. The picture is best if the car, in its iconic primary paint scheme, looks really big in it (my example is a really small car the zoom doesn't go any closer), if the situation portrayed fits the car (the kart in a corner, the Lancia on dirt or ice, the Indy in a huge jump...) and bonus points for style if it's a picture from some sort of historic replay (the one above is from Renato Biker winning ZCT131, a race with almost all karts, on a track designed by the designer of the kart (a cool guy by the way, that designer)).

Sounds just right to me.

[Overdrijf]

Thanks for the feedback. I will be vacationing for about 2 weeks starting Thursday, so the project is going to look a little quiet between that and both race series finishing shortly after, but I'm planning to start looking for expert writers soon after.

Most definitely! I can't conceive a Super Trunfo card without top speed or acceleration 

I think you're right, it needs some stats.

This would allow either enlarging the font size or increasing the form factor.

The vertical spacing between the lines in the "Tips" feels a bit too small; shortening the text, as suggested above, might help.

Font size is a little problematic in any case. As you said it did look a little cluttered, so it needs some more distance between the lines, and I really like the amount of information I can cram in the current concepts, so the font size might be trending a bit down if anything. Oops... (Although it really does look like it's getting a bit less clear with the downsizing now, so I might have to just cut a line of text after all.)

(On form factors: your sample card has, approximately, golden ratio proportions, 1 : Phi~=1.618. For the sake of comparison, Magic cards are 63 x 88 mm, 1 : 1.397. If you like the allure of the golden number, it is worth noting that 2-1/Phi ~= 1.382 .)

I went for bridge card size, 88.9 by 57.15mm. That format minus 4mm margins around the edges is this printable surface. Kind of with the idea that maybe one day they could be physical cards maybe. The current concept then has 350dpi because that nicely fit the 640x480 size of the pictures. Admittedly 350 is a weird number, I don't even know if printers could easily do that. Magic is printed on poker size cards, which have a little extra width. That would surely be another option. Much of the extra space is wasted though because the picture, given the same ratio becomes larger while the stat lines keep taking up just as much space.

(I presume the two top speed values are straight line and real, right? In that case, I feel it would look a little tidier to use "154 mph (156 mph)" instead of "154/156 mph", but I don't have a strong rationale for my preference.)

Yes they are. Good suggestion.

Some of what we mean when we say "fast car" or "slow car" is conveyed by top speed and acceleration, so I think it would be better to focus on handling when it comes to translating that to  a property. There might be a "high grip" property that indicates a car has high grip relative to its straight line performance . The opposite property, "low grip", might be applied to the moderately fast cars in which the lack of grip is most acutely felt (GTO, Countach, GT3, etc.). There possibly also is a place for superlatives ("very high grip"). "Nimble" for the cars that have better than usual handling due to being short (Audi, Lancia, Kart, etc.) might make sense as a separate property, though it does overlap with "Short".

This touches on a very fundamental issue, which is: how much do the cards need to explain about general Stunts physics? If you have a short car, do you still need to say it's nimble and has a short jump length? Everybody who knows about the connection will see it as wasted space, but everybody who doesn't know it needs a way to learn it, and where better than in these cards?

In the latest concept I'm letting go of the properties a little bit because I'm trying to fit more of them in stats. But there will probably still be a need for some sort of "special" line. There are less rules about what terms should and should not be named there, but they should be standout properties of the car. Basically, if you're quickly flipping through your cards to find the right car you're not reading the tips, just the stats, so stuff like this should be with the stats:

An important one is "Off-road", for the cars with better than usual handling on non-asphalt terrain (LM002, Melange, Lotus).

Good one. Probably the main property that doesn't fit another stat, unless I can work it in with the grip line somehow. Something like "(ice/4)" behind it or something? (Actually, that's not that bad an idea, assuming there are no cars that get a bonus of either dirt or ice but not both, that would complicate things a bit...)

Speaking of grip. I posted this in the Zakstunts comments yesterday, but I'm trying out a way to stat it: (car length (technically half length, but the effect is the same)/handling parameter)/the same number for the Indy. It gives some reasonable sounding numbers, but they might look a bit too precise for how pretty rough they actually are. These are some of the numbers that come rolling out:
Countach, GTO, Corvette 34%, Acura, LM002 37%, Carrera 38%, Lancia, Audi 46%, F40 70%, Superkart 82%, Jaguar 83%, P962, Audi DTM 84%, Mercedes DTM 86%, BMW DTM 87%, Indy 100%.
It does show the gap between slow and fast cars pretty well, and it does show how the DTM cars manage to make up time in the corners compared to the IMSA's... Even the kart is kind of in the right place. While it feels very quick around the corners I don't think it's actually faster then say the P962...

I don't think there is an established name yet. "First Gear Powergear" sounds appropriate.

Might get abbreviated to 1st gear powergear to make it fit (currently positioning it in the gear box line), but yes, I think that's the term I'm going with.

Colours for categories is perhaps a little more in line with TCG tradition; still, I like both ideas. One way of combining them that might work would be using a star rating on the top of the card to suggest difficulty (it would be akin to a mana cost in a TCG, with a high rating conveying "this is costly/complex/difficult to pull off, bu the payoff can be fearsome").

Colors for categories does look pretty cool. Thinking of a color scheme a bit like this (text is a work in progress, meant as a guideline for writers to pick categories for the car or trick they're writing for):

I think it is important not to use contrasting colours for the background of the main text box, for the sake of readability. Different shades of the same colour, on the other hand, might be fine. One thing I can envision is picking an image (it could be a single one for all cards, or something car-specific like a detail from the dashboard) and tinting it monochrome with the card background colour.

I love the idea of the dashboard or a dashboard feature in the background like this. That would be so cool. I just haven't figure out how to properly do it. Another idea I had is continuing the main colors of the image (for most picture that's road grey, grass green and/or water blue) all the way down, kind of stretching out the world inside the image to the whole card. It looks pretty cool on the concept art below. It's also not a lot of work and the text is legible on it. The big difference with any other style is that it doesn't split the card into an image and a text section as clearly, which makes it look less like a regular car card.

Speaking of concept art, here it is. A car and a trick (I'm focusing on the cars, but with 11 original cars, custom cars dripping in (and out) at a pretty small rate and many people having a handful of favorites we're going to run out of stuff to write pretty soon).

It would be fun if the text for the tricks could be closer to that for the cars, having a bunch of stats, but I have no clue how to do that while still having them be helpful.





EDIT: Wait, does anyone happen to know what font Stunts itself uses? It doesn't seem ideal, too long/wide, but it would fit the flavor, and is very clear at low resolution... On second thought, it's probably some special render, only does one size, and thus not really a font. So I'd have to cut everything together from separate letters. No thanks.

[Cas]

Stunts font, yes, probably would make it more work and take up more space, but could be used for the car name or something. In my opinion, the main font should preferably be white or at least have a white border (like in the movies subtitles), because most of the colours during Stunts game play are dark. Also, I would suggest using all caps so that a more condensed font could be used and still be legible at that size and allow for more text, perhaps?  Just thoughts. Also, if these are going to be Super Triunfo like cards, there should be primarily features that can be compared as "more" or "less", that is, magnitudes. Colours for categories also could allow for other games that can be played with the cards, but for that, same number of cars with the same card colour would be important. Like always, all of these are just ideas I'm dropping for you to make what you think best of them freely   This is a very nice project!

About tricks, I think that, beside the cards, there should be more wiki articles on tricks and how to perform them. There, more text and images (including animations) can easily be added and it would definitely help many pipsqueaks... including myself!  I've already been creating wiki articles and I'm already comfortable with it. What I'm not good at, though, is actually performing tricks, ha, ha, so if you give me hints on that part, I could write the articles there. Count on me.