Car cards!

[Overdrijf]

Stunts font, yes, probably would make it more work and take up more space, but could be used for the car name or something.

For the car name I could actually copy it straight from the car selection screen. It'd have to be blown up quite a bit, but that would add to the pixelated look...

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.

This is technically true, but it looks silly when I try it. There's just not enough pixels for a white border, and fully white text, while it stands out very well, looks off somehow.

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.

I have been trying several fonts. In fact, tomorrow I'm going to see about abusing the boss' printer for a bit and print out about 18 different combinations of fonts and backgrounds at real card size. I'm hoping it will give me some extra clarity. I haven't really tried allcaps yet, but I have tried the very condensed font Impact. It was not a success. Getting too narrow is just as bad as getting too low, at this point.

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!

At the current point there's flat road top speed, real top speed, 0-60, 0-100, length, handling and if you squint a bit difficulty or number of gear. So that's 6 or if you're being really generous 8. Then again, 0-60 and 0-100 will usually point to the same winner, and handling is kind of a strange stat, especially as the raw number does not include extra grip on terrain, so if you're strict there's only kind of 4 stats there.

Speaking of backgrounds, I played around with Duplode's idea of a dashboardfeature in monochrome a bit, it looks pretty cool:

It certainly looks more like a car card/TCG card. It also adds a semi-recognizable feature that you actually see while using the car to the card, so that's super nice. It's also very flexible. One one car you can use the full height of the dash, on another you zoom in on the speedometer, you just get bigger pixels. (Although the colorization process will require a bit of a manual touch, which takes time.) There are also some things about it I still have to think about. The tricks don't have dashboard features, so we'll have to come up with some other image. And I was planning to do the trick cards in blue, purple and black, darker colors which will bring down the legibility. I could do them with very light blue/purple/grey, which is sort of okay (though grey will never stand out from black letters as well as yellow does) but whether that looks good on a card with a dark border, not sure yet. I also feel like this attracts a bit too much attention to how large and square the picture is, but that might actually look a lot better if the image is not mostly sky with a really tiny car.

(The font combination on this card is also one of the frontrunners for the print test tomorrow. It's the only combination I found that will let me use a line less with the same amount of text. The letters are kind of small, but they seem pretty legible.) Together with removing more empty lines I'm hoping this will look like a very readable card in tomorrow's test. It looks pretty readable on a screen...)

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.

Sounds like a very worthwhile project. Maybe we can leech some writers off each other. Ones they admit they know a trick well...

EDIT: This one is a failed experiment as far as being super legible goes, but I'm sharing it anyway because it looks pretty boss. Bit of a Sin City vibe... And it's easy to do for any car containing black or grey.

[GTAManRCR]

This second version (Gray colored car detail background) is bad, because the text is unreadable
So keep yourself at the car's difficulty color as background, because text is readable in it

[GTAManRCR]

Use THIS

[Duplode]

Lovely!

[Overdrijf]

Use THIS

Now that is the sort of feedback I can use.

I think you're right, it looks much clearer in print too, not to mention kind of cool.

For the trick cards I can use teal/light blue, blue and purple rather than running up to black, that might work.

Font wise I'm not sure what I want yet. Maybe this one has too small an x-height (height of lower case letters compared to upper case ones) after all. But i can solve that after clearing my head with two weeks of vacation.

So the last real thing I have to add for now is what I thought of yesterday after I made that post: I can do this borderless.


See you all in two weeks!

(I'll compulsively check the forum on my phone, but I won't be making cards.)

[GTAManRCR]

[/quote]

Looks even better now

[Overdrijf]

Had some time to mull it over. Have some minor improvements:


Text size upped a bit. I think overall the slightly smaller space between the letters takes less from the legibility than the smaller height of the letters themselves did. Maybe. I might change my mind back on this one.
Replaced 0-100 for the half mile time, because it's more likely to give a different insight/comparison between cars than the 0-60.
Simplified the grip percentage to just the tire grip modifier as a percentage of that of the Indy. A bit less useful maybe, but more objective. The one between brackets counts the terrain modifier, so if a car has twice the ice modifier the Indy has that second number will be twice as big as the first one. (The modifiers are the same for by far most cars)
Replaced the special category for a line where you can just give a summary of how the car drives.
Introduced a simple that indicates difficulty. I don't think I'm entirely happy with the placement and/or the colors yet (it needs to stand out more, but both a lighter and a darker background look weird), but the idea is that the combination of a color, a shape and a letter (for basic, advanced and pro) gives a clearer idea of why the cards have different colors than just the colors.

Edit: it just occurred to me that a star with a P on it will be read as "has powergear", so I should probably look for a replacement letter. E for Expert maybe?
Not sure if I'm entirely happy with how all the stats are written out.
It would also be nice to be able to fit the horsepower somewhere, but I'm cramped for space as it is, and it doesn't really add any information about driving behavior. The same thing goes for car weight, the speeds and acceleration tell their story much better than these stats themselves would.

For the trick cards: it would be nice to have stats after all. Maybe just some stuff that rates 1-3 stars, like applicability (how often you can use a trick, 3 stars for a trick like replay handling), speed (at which it can be performed), combinability with other tricks, is that even a word? I don't really know. The new color scheme seems to work pretty well, but I also haven't thought of a good image to use for the background of the trick cards.

In other words: the car cards will probably start accepting submissions sooner than the trick cards.

[dreadnaut]

Is all the text bold? How would it work to use a regular weight, and hightlight sections with contrast? E.g. bold/regular or black / 80% black ?

Also, can I suggest InkScape?

[Overdrijf]

Also, can I suggest InkScape?

You can. I have been meaning to learn that program for a while now, rather than always lazily reverting back to my loyal GIMP. (Everything is out of place, I can't find even the simplest things. I'm super pigeon holed into my choice of software.) However, I don't think this project is the right one for making my switch to vector graphics, because I'm working from a pixelated source, the screenshots, and I'm preserving their look and carrying it over into the rest of the design. A non-vector program like the GIMP should do a better job at that, and does anything I need it to.

Well, anything except...

Is all the text bold? How would it work to use a regular weight, and hightlight sections with contrast? E.g. bold/regular or black / 80% black ?

That. Anything except combining different versions of a font in the same textbox. To do this, for instance making all the stuff before the : accentuated in some way while everything else is not, I either need to manually align a bunch of textboxes or achieve the highlighting effect through non-text editing means (by far my preferred method, less work), for instance selecting part of the textbox and changing the brightness or copying it onto itself to achieve a bold effect.

However, I don't think non-bold text looks good, at least not in a digital form. Here's an example:



It looks good enough on full size, but as you zoom around (as you would when for instance looking at it on a phone screen) the letters lose their shape too soon, even with this relatively large font size. At least, that's my take on it. The main reason for this is that I'm sticking to the Stunts palette, no proper range of mixed colors means no proper antialiasing. Combined with a small font and a busy background... I do really like the effect of using just the game's own palette though. So I'm aiming for a font that can handle it, and it looke like that will be a bold font. It might be nice to go some sort of middle way though, some sort of semi-bold?... Haven't really found a good one of those sans serif yet.

EDIT: An effect like this might work for a middle road, even if it does look a bit comic sansy...


EDIT again: Found a few semibold/medium options. I'm also not against mixing fonts, but as I said it's a bit more work, so I'd like to have a good idea before I try it.



On the one hand they still scream "this is a bold typeface", on the other hand put right next to an actual bold one they seem a little more toned down.

[Overdrijf]

Ready to start pulling myself out of the font rabbit hole. Posting two more options, no comments. I will be mulling it over for a few more days, opinions from other people are more than welcome.





I also finally found a color that I think makes the A for advanced mark work. It was hidden in the most important colors section.





EDIT:
And one final experiment with a slightly different DPI, resulting in a relatively smaller picture and some more room on the plate.

I like looking at concepts in the forum. It's a good thing I'm using external hosting.

[Duplode]

A few observations and minor suggestions:

• From the last post, I feel the third option looks a little better, though the second one might be a little easier to read. It is hard to know for sure without looking at the printouts, though.
• The difficulty marker would perhaps fit in more naturally if it were fully above the picture, alongside the title. If you are going to keep the colours as they are, though, the current placement makes sense as a way of adding xome contrast.
• "E" is indeed better than "P" for the third tier.
• If you can afford a little horizontal space, consider adding a space between the units and the corresponding values ("154 mph").
• Length x width might look nicer as "8'5'' x 4'0'' (2.92 x 1.39 m)".

[Overdrijf]

All helpful, but I'm going to focus on this one:

From the last post, I feel the third option looks a little better, though the second one might be a little easier to read. It is hard to know for sure without looking at the printouts, though.[/li][/list]

It's an interesting sentiment. Does anyone else feel this way?

I'm saying that because I like the font of image 2, both on screen and in print, but in theory it should be the wrong way to go about this. It has a pretty low x-height (=small non-capital letters) and it's bold enough to stand out as "is all the text bold? Why?" The font used in the first and third image in that last post fixes both of those things, having a much bigger x-height (so that's large non-capital letters) while being less bold but bold enough to read, and it does it without taking up extra space, or without looking like a weird font.

In short, if the text in image 2 looks better than that in image 1 (3 is based on 1, it's just as easy to make those changes to image 2) I can stop worrying and just use the theoretically bad font.




I'll play around a bit with your other suggestions and any other people make. As you can see the changes are getting smaller, that's a good thing.

[Overdrijf]

This project is currently pretty much on hold from my end. I had a breakthrough regarding some more serious projects I should be undertaking, so that's where most of my thinking time is currently going. If anyone wants to pick up where I left off I can send what I have with some notes (or you can just start from scratch, it's your project at that point), or I can just leave this as a "someday" project. As the kart proved, twice, I do sometimes get back to someday projects.

[alanrotoi]

I'm very interested in this! I found a card game of Street Rod! Maybe we can take some ideas from it!

https://www.streetrodonline.com/2017/03/01/new-street-rod-the-cardgame/

[Cas]

  I wouldn't have imagined it. There definitely must be something like this for Stunts. We have so many cars that we can make them cars-only cards!