Project 2: Trading Card Game

The second project I worked on was a trading card game. Trading cards have been around for a very long time in many countries. For example, Japan is where Yu-Gi-Oh!™ and Pokémon™ cards are created, and what I grew up with as a child. I would sometimes play the game associated with the cards, but usually I would collect them for their illustrations, as well as for what others would consider as rare cards.

When we bought cards, we would buy them in small packs of 8 or so cards, or individual cards at the local flea market. Back then, cards were not cheap, and would cost ¥500 ($5). It went to show that we were willing to take risks to discover and collect what others had labeled as ‘rare’ or ‘cool’, which was a design principle I wanted to work with in this project.

The principle of people taking risks to discover rarities that I found when collecting cards was not the only time this occurred. It was such an ingrained part of our childhood that both my late friend and I would go home and create our own card game and illustrations, taking inspiration from the fact that we could create our own rare cards for ourselves. We extended this to encapsulate narratives we came up with when exploring and playing games together. I considered the narrative quality we came up with equally as important. It was all this in mind that I decided to take the medium of trading cards and make my own set, based off of a narrative I had been creating, and illustrating cards with monsters I had been designing for a while now. I wanted others to experience what we had when we were kids: Getting cards that had shards of narratives written either in descriptive format or through images, and being able to piece them together. This would enhance their happiness when getting cards that they wanted. I also wanted to recreate the experiences me and my late friend had as a child when we were trading cards, as well as the community and interactions it built among all our friends.

To make these cards, I took illustrations I had drawn over the years in pen, and then scanned them into my computer, allowing me to color them in Photoshop. Afterwards, I imported the finished illustrations to Illustrator, where I had made a card template, and put the images in.

As part of my process, I had several boxes filled with drawings, games, and cards that my late friend and I drew as children sent over, and then took a look at the contents. The sketches were all narrative-focused, so I then decided that I would make the primary focus of my cards on the narrative I had created. I gave each character illustration I did a sentence or two to give it context in the world I was building. I was primarily focused on the narrative but also wanted to create an underlying game mechanic in order to appeal to a wider audience. After rough sketching different rules, I finally settled with several primary rules that I felt were relatively fair. As a trading card game, the rules do not have to be completely fair, as everything is dependent on how lucky the player is in getting good cards when buying them in packs. I focused on making the rules very simple and streamlined so that it was accessible to a wider audience as well (in many trading card games, there are over 10 rules just for card abilities alone, in my card game, there is 1 primary objective, and 7 abilities). After figuring these two areas out, most of the process was coloring my sketches on Photoshop, putting them into the card template on Illustrator, and then giving them a narrative, name, and ability. Writing for these characters put the constraint of space on me (due to the card size, and wanting to keep the text legible), so several revisions were needed for each card to make all the text fit and have enough space to breathe. When naming the cards, I tried to capture the core characteristics of each monster and character, and then sum it up in a name. In terms of the card design, I had several challenges that I needed to resolve. The first was indicating the rarities of the cards. For this, I decided that the text color and sub-border could adopt the rarity color (blue for rarest, gold for rare, silver for uncommon, brown for common). These colors were chosen for similar reasons as how I chose the prize colors for the Garapon project, by looking at various games and the visual languages they used. Another design challenge was applying symbols that showed the associations some of the characters I had created with fictional organizations in the narrative world I was creating. I tried various iterations of placing the symbol on the card in a way that wasn’t disruptive to the player but also was clearly visible, and chose to create an inflated border to place the symbol in, near the illustration. One final design choice I had to make was how I wanted it to look like a traditional playing or not. I realized quickly that it was very hard to play with type and image in the context of an illustrated card, because of the various colors making it hard to read text on the card. As a result, I left the text on a darker colored version of the background. After all of this, I had the cards printed both on 300 gsm paper, and foil printed (applying a shiny rainbow coat to the underside of the print to make it shimmer). Once I was finished calculating the number of cards I would need of both the foil and color printed cards, I then packaged them into groups of 6 cards with rarer cards appearing scarcer, and each pack containing 2 foil cards. This way I was able to simulate a trading card game booster pack. I tied the cards together using black and white string (an homage to my late friend, since in Japan when concerning a funeral, envelopes are tied in black and white string).

People enjoyed the cards, having different reactions. Each person had a personal favorite card, regardless of whether it was a rare card or not, and were more concerned by either the narrative or illustration. I hope that the interactions when trading between people will allow for personal narratives and experiences to form, beyond the narrative I have constructed for the small contained world.