Post #2- A (Beginner’s) Graphic Design Tool Box

I am not a professional graphics designer but It’s a hobby I enjoy a great deal. I’ve designed all of the Cruise Monkey Games logos and all the cards for One Letter Better and our upcoming 3 Somes Party Game (It’s not what you think!). The monkey face on the logo actually goes back about six years for a line of T-shirts I designed. My wife and I are huge fans of cruises and she gave me a little stuffed monkey for Valentine’s Day. He turned into Cruise Monkey.
There are three programs I use almost exclusively so I thought I would share them with anyone who might be trying to figure out how to design their own game.

I’ll have links at the end of the blog where you can find all of these programs and download them. You’ll be happy to know that the three programs I’m covering today are all free.
A quick tutorial on the difference between vector graphics and raster. Vector graphics programs like Inkscape (Illustrator is Adobe‘s paid version of a vector graphics program) use math to draw shapes. If you draw a straight line it makes a calculation from point A to point B and then fills the line in between. This is why vector graphics can be blown up as large as you want without distorting. I’ve actually used Inkscape to design a banner that was 3 feet wide and 10 feet long and it came out very crisp and sharp. Raster programs, which we’ll discuss in a minute, manipulate pixels. They are primarily used for making alterations on photographs or making drawings that are more artistic and less geometrical. Blowing up a roster generated image will sometimes cause pixelation, where you can actually see the individual pixels.

First up is Inkscape, a free vector graphics program. It’s pretty easy to use, and the user interface is fairly straightforward. There is definitely a learning curve but there are hundreds of videos available to teach you how to do almost everything the program will do. There are many things I don’t know about Inkscape but it does exactly what I want it to do. And when I need to make a shape or manipulate something in a way I’m not sure about, I simply do a quick search on YouTube and I can almost always find the answer. One of the people I’ve followed the most is Logos by Nick. His tutorials are very straightforward and very easy to follow. He also has a series of classes you can take if you really want to improve your graphics design abilities quickly. (Link at the end of the blog)
In the future I may do a quick how to video or at least some screenshots showing some of the basics of using Inkscape to design games. You can literally put anything from small three-quarter inch tokens to the entire game board on this program, add text and just about every type of geometric shape you can think of. You can also import pictures and other artwork. Like with any program there is a learning curve but you can be drawing shapes and adding text in a very short period of time. Inkscape will also export to a bunch of different file types but PNG is usually the best choice. If you are sending files to a company like The Game Crafter, that is their required format.

As I mentioned before, the other side of the graphics world is raster graphics. The big dog on the block is Adobe’s Photoshop. In the good old days, you would simply pony up a few hundred dollars and get a copy of illustrator and/or Photoshop and you’d be good to go. But Adobe, like so many software companies, has gone to a subscription style business model. This means you pay for the use of their programs… FOREVER! This might be OK if you’re a big time graphics design company and you can write such an enormous expense off on your taxes, but for small rabbits like us who are designing games predominately as a hobby, it’s a pretty big pill to swallow. The price as of this writing is nearly $60 a month, $20 if you’re a student. That still adds up to a big chunk of change. So, as a free alternative there is GIMP, An acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, GNU being the name of the company that developed it.

I’ll be honest, I probably know how to use fewer options on GIMP than I do an Inkscape but what it does for me it does extremely well. Two things I use GIMP most often for are erasing parts of pictures and or removing backgrounds and changing colors of objects that I draw in Inkscape. The problem with “Filling“ something with a color in Inkscape is as a vector program it tries to calculate where the lines should be based on the shape. This is fine if the shape is a square or a hexagon or even a circle with very regular lines. But if you draw something with a lot of curvy or wavy lines, Inkscape struggles to get the color to the edge of the border. However, in GIMP, because it is manipulating pixels, it does a great job of filling in colors and removing colors you don’t want. GIMP is also great if you have some artistic talent and you actually want to draw something. I personally use a track ball but I do have a computer with a touchscreen and GIMP responds pretty well to using a stylus on touchscreen. If you are a really good artist, then you’ll probably want to use something like Procreate. That seems to be the direction people with talent go, I’m just not one of them. Again, learning this program is a matter of taking the time to watch videos and experiment with the different functions. I’m sure as I progress down this path of game design I’ll probably have to expand my knowledge base to get the designs I’m looking for.

The third program I want to cover today, and the most recent addition to my little quiver of graphics tools is Nandeck. This program was developed by Andrea Nand and is freeware. He does accept donations which I fully intend to do as soon as I’ve made a dime off of anything I’ve made with his program. Nandeck as far as I know only does one thing, it produces decks of cards. But it does this extremely well from my experience. All you need to do is put the items you want to appear on the card in a spreadsheet. Each row in the spreadsheets an individual card and each column is an element on that card. You have a card do you want more than one of? You can designate a column for quantity and the program will produce however many of that particular card you indicate saving you the hassle of having to copy all that information over and over and over. Nandeck is especially helpful when you are at the prototyping stage where you’re repeatedly making a lot of changes. Instead of going to each individual card and editing words or shapes or whatever else might be on it, you simply make the change on the spreadsheet, run the program and Nandeck will produce your new deck. I have seen some truly beautiful and amazing projects done with this program. I’m still very, very new to learning how it works but there is a lot of documentation and Andrea tends to be very available to answer questions on BGG (Board Game Geek). When we were developing One Letter Better, we were always tweaking the wording on the cards. Rather than having to find each individual card all I had to do was make the change in the spreadsheet, copy it and paste it to each card that required that particular change and run the program. OLB would have been a whole lot more work without the use of this extremely versatile and powerful program. Once I get a little more experience with this great tool, I’ll come back and take a more in depth look at it.

As far as the physical process of making two dimensional game pieces (cards, tokens, boards and tiles) I can’t imagine anything you couldn’t do with these three programs. Now, take that with a grain of salt, I’ve been at this game design thing less than a year. In another year I may have some more tools. Considering they’re all free, they are a good place to start your game design journey IMNSHO (in my not so humble opinion).
Enjoy the weekend and make someone smile.

Inkscape download site                GIMP download site           Nandeck download site       Logos by Nick

Ed, on behalf of the Cruise Monkey Crew