Multideck Maker: How to Create Custom Cards

This tutorial will cover how to customize, modify and create your own playing cards using the layouts and art assets available through the Singularity Games Patreon. Patrons not only get access to the art assets, but get to make suggestions for new art and custom layouts.

There are 4 main components to the whole operation:

Art Assets: PNG image files for the suit icons, royalty cards, etc

Layout instructions: A text file with instructions for the layout of the cards.

Link Spreadsheet: A spreadsheet that tells the layout instructions which art assets to use. This is the only file that actually needs to be edited to customize your own cards.

Nandeck: Software that takes the art assets, layout instructions, and link spreadsheet and creates the cards.

All right, let’s get everything set up:

1. Download the entire Multideck Maker folder from the Patreon Drive. This will include the Art assets, the layout instructions and the link file.

2. Download the free software nanDeck: http://www.nand.it/nandeck/

 No need to install the software, it runs straight from the executable.

This program is the heart of everything. It is the software that combines the layout instructions, the link spreadsheet and the art assets to create the cards. nanDeck was created by Andrea Nand and is impressive at how powerful it is. It can have a bit of steep learning curve though to get the results you want; however, you do not have to worry about that because the card templates are already done!

3. To test everything, we are first going to generate the Singularity Deck Diamonds Suit.

a)       Open nanDeck. 

b)       On the left side click “Open deck”

c)        Navigate to the Multideck Maker Folder, go to Deck Templates -> Standard Layout and open “Standard Layout - Diamonds.txt”

d)       On the left side of nanDeck, select “Validate Deck,” then “Build Deck.” Building the deck will take a couple minutes. 

e)       On the right side of nanDeck select “Card Preview” to be able to scroll through the cards. You should see cards that look like the standard Singularity Deck Diamonds suit. If not, let me know.

f)        If you wanted to, after closing the card preview, you could select “Save Images” or “PDF” on the left-hand side of nanDeck to save the output file of the cards. I’ll go into more detail on this later. 

4. Once it seems like everything is working, open the “Standard Layout – Diamonds.xlsx” excel spreadsheet in Deck Templates -> Standard Layout. This is where you can edit the card contents.

It’s going to look like a lot of info, but it looks more intimidating than it really is. Each row is a card, and each column is a feature of the card. At the top of each column is the name of the card feature.

The card features that can be edited and where they are at in the layout can be seen in the below image:

Each feature will be explained in detail later, but here are the main things to know:

The first column, Card Name is to help with organization and does not correspond to a part of the card design.

If the column name includes “Image” in it, the cell should be a file path to the image. For Example "..\..\Deck Components\Singularity Deck 2.0\Icon Diamonds.png" The "..\..\" is a relative file path from the location of the layout text file.

If the column name includes “Color” the cell expects a hexidecimal color code. This site:  https://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_picker.asp is great resource, just grab the #code for whatever color you want. The Singularity Deck Color Reference spreadsheet in the "Deck templates Folder" lists the colors used in the Singularity deck.

If the column name includes “Text”, the cell expects text, for example the card’s rank.

If the column includes "PipGroup" it controls the layout of the suit pips in the center of a card. Check out the detailed explanation later to see how to adjust pip layout.

Also, worth noting is that the first row of the spreadsheet labeled Card Back is reserved for the Card Back image. The only thing that should be changed in this row is the image path in the BackgroundImage column.

5. Okay! Time to make some edits.

Let’s change the jack of diamonds into a purple prince:

In the “Standard Layout – Diamonds.xlsx” spreadsheet, find row 28 for the Jack card.

a)      In the RankTopText column, change the “J” in the to a “P.” This changes the rank at the top of the card.

b)      In the PrimarySuitColor column, change the #2B4B91 color code to #8F2A80 . This changes the color of the suit icons in the corners.

c)     Likewise, in the FaceColor2 column, change the #2B4B91 color code to #8F2A80 . This changes the color of the “accents” on the jack artwork in the center of the card.

d)      Save and close the spreadsheet

6. In nanDeck, just like before:

a)       On the left side click “Open deck”

b)       Navigate to the Multideck Maker Folder, go to Deck Templates -> Standard Layout and open “Standard Layout - Diamonds.txt”

c)        On the left side of nanDeck, select “Validate Deck,” then “Build Deck.” Building the deck will take a couple minutes. 

d)       On the right side of nanDeck select “Card Preview” to be able to scroll through the cards.

Bam! Purple prince! 

Now that we have a gist of the workflow, The below section will cover each card component in a bit more detail.