Creating a card deck

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Overview
If you want to add cards to your game, you first need a picture of each card you want to add, arranged in a grid in one image file. You may have a number of image files, each containing a single card. You can use the free Image Grid software to arrange the pictures in a grid – simply start the program, drag your files onto the window, and press Save. If Image Grid can’t arrange your image in a regular grid, make sure that each file has the same dimensions.

For this tutorial, let’s say you want to create a card deck from a bunch of Phylo cards. Download and extract the zip archive with an image containing a grid of cards and a card back image here.

Now go to the editor, create a new package, and in the new package create a new object template of the type “Card / Token / Tile”. The template editor will open, showing a card with a big red X indicating that it does not have a valid image selected – let’s change that.

Click on the Front Image button on the upper right, then Browse, and select the “PhyloCards.png” from the archive you downloaded. You’ll see the card change, but it will show the whole image with all card pictures. You have to specify how many card pictures are in the grid, which you can do using the “Cards in Image” fields. Enter 3 for horizontal and 4 for vertical.

Now you should see the card clearly showing the first card image, but it’s just a single card and not a stack yet. To add the remaining cards, press the “+” button next to “Card 1/1” eleven times. Each card in the stack has its own index that determines what part of the image grid is used. You can have multiple cards with the same index, so you don’t have to repeat a card picture in your image in order to use it multiple times in the same stack. When you add a card, the current index is automatically increased by one, so pressing “+” as long as there are more pictures available produces a deck in which each card occurs once. You can click on cards in the list and change their image using the “Image Index” slider below. Try creating a deck that includes some of the cards two or three times!

Finally, we can add a separate card back. Currently, your deck uses the first of the card pictures as the back image. Note that the standard 3D view shows you the back of the card stack (that’s why you see the whale). In the upper right, select “Separate file” as Back Image Type. A Back Image button will appear below, click it and select the “PhyloBack.png” file from the archive.

That’s it, you’ve created a new card deck! Give your new template a name (in the upper left), save it, and go back. You will now see your card deck in the list. When you create games with a lot of cards, you may not be able to fit all of them on one image. In this case, you can just create multiple images and make a card stack for each of them. In the game or when creating a game state, you can combine cards from multiple stacks with the same dimensions!