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Jelly monster playing cards (still in progress)


meneerfretje

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Wonderful! I have to confess that when I saw the topic title I expected to see a jelly monster sitting there, playing a card game. :D

 

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These are really great. The colours used are really nice and the artwork has a good sense of fun.

I have some very minor comments:
* Are you having a different colour jelly monster for each suit? That would make the suits easy to distinguish at a glance.
* Have you tried using a number of jelly monsters instead of the normal suit symbols? E.g. Using six monsters instead of six hearts. (Might get a bit crowded when you get to ten though.)
* Did you know that you've got two aces of spades? I know it's a work in progress, I just thought I'd mention it in case clubs was accidentally missed.
* I noticed some tiny issues where some of the suit symbols aren't consistent across all of the symbols. E.g. The heart under the ace is different to the hearts in the five, and the spade on the top-left-hand of the ace isn't the same upside-down on the same card.

Anyway, trifling issues aside, if I was looking to buy a pack of cards then this is the sort of thing I'd go for rather than a normal boring pack.

I'm looking forward to seeing more progress on this. It might give me some impetus to have a go at trying to make my own.

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On 10/20/2017 at 1:54 PM, GarryP said:

These are really great. The colours used are really nice and the artwork has a good sense of fun.

I have some very minor comments:
* Are you having a different colour jelly monster for each suit? That would make the suits easy to distinguish at a glance.
* Have you tried using a number of jelly monsters instead of the normal suit symbols? E.g. Using six monsters instead of six hearts. (Might get a bit crowded when you get to ten though.)
* Did you know that you've got two aces of spades? I know it's a work in progress, I just thought I'd mention it in case clubs was accidentally missed.
* I noticed some tiny issues where some of the suit symbols aren't consistent across all of the symbols. E.g. The heart under the ace is different to the hearts in the five, and the spade on the top-left-hand of the ace isn't the same upside-down on the same card.

Anyway, trifling issues aside, if I was looking to buy a pack of cards then this is the sort of thing I'd go for rather than a normal boring pack.

I'm looking forward to seeing more progress on this. It might give me some impetus to have a go at trying to make my own.

 

Thanks for the feedback!
Yes I was aware of the few mistakes in the concept, I kept the two different spades because I wasn't sure which one I preferred more.

 

And I'm still not really sure how I should design the whole deck of cards. My first option was to have different colour jelly monsters for each suit indeed.

Most decks have like 55 +/- cards in it. Creating a different illustration for each card is an option, but I'm afraid I will run out of ideas to have the monsters mirrored, interact with the mirrored monster and have the symbol interaction in it. (heart 5 is a great example of the idea, last image)

 

my second option would be creating a unique illustration for each card in a suit ( A, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, J, Q, K) give them all one colour and copy the illustration for the other suits but with different colours and symbols, but I'm not sure if that would come off as laziness.

 

 

(also the numbers will be redrawn, just filling spaces now for the looks)

So any tips or help would be great!

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Come to think about it, you should only have two colours across the suits - usually red and black - as a lot of patience games use this difference, E.g. You have to put a red on a black and then a black on a red, etc. Using a different colour for each suit would cause confusion unless the colours used could easily be very distinguished into two "pairs", E.g. two different greens and two different reds. Be careful which colours you use though as some people can't distinguish some colours from others: http://www.color-blindness.com/

I think a different illustration for every single card would be too much work that might actually make things worse. If every card has its own illustration it might be more difficult to see which are the court cards (jack, queen, and king). Obviously the value will be on the card but it's nice to be able to easily tell them apart. I'm not sure how the ace comes in this as the ace of spades is usually different to the rest of the aces.

It might be best to stick to a more traditional design with spade/club/heart/diamond symbols for the numerical cards and an illustration for the court cards. Having said that, you could always try making the symbols more "jellified" and maybe putting faces on them. Also, children can use the symbols on the cards to learn basic numbers. And, not everyone uses Roman numerals so if you don't know what an "8" is you can still count up the number of symbols to put the cards in order.

You could have one configuration of monster(s) for jacks, another configuration for queens, and another for kings. That way it would be easy for people to distinguish between them without knowing what the J,Q and K letters were (not everyone uses those letters). The monsters could be different across the suits - as they are normally - but their general look across the set of jacks (or queens, or kings) would be similar. If you know what I mean.

All said and done, if you want people to use the cards then they've got to be easy to play with which means a more traditional design and layout might work best.

I'm not a regular card player so please don't take anything I say as any kind of "expert opinion". I just think that creating playing/trading cards is a good design exercise. They seem very simple but there are a lot of issues that need to be addressed.

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5 hours ago, nylandlars said:

Most decks have like 55 +/- cards in it. Creating a different illustration for each card is an option, but I'm afraid I will run out of ideas to have the monsters mirrored, interact with the mirrored monster and have the symbol interaction in it. (heart 5 is a great example of the idea, last image)

 

Most decks have 54 cards (13 of each of four suits, plus two jokers). As discussed below, a different illustration for each card would likely make them difficult to play with.

 

3 hours ago, GarryP said:

Come to think about it, you should only have two colours across the suits - usually red and black - as a lot of patience games use this difference, E.g. You have to put a red on a black and then a black on a red, etc. Using a different colour for each suit would cause confusion unless the colours used could easily be very distinguished into two "pairs", E.g. two different greens and two different reds. Be careful which colours you use though as some people can't distinguish some colours from others: http://www.color-blindness.com/

 

Red/green colour-blindness is the most common type, so red and blue would probably be a better choice.

 

3 hours ago, GarryP said:

I think a different illustration for every single card would be too much work that might actually make things worse. If every card has its own illustration it might be more difficult to see which are the court cards (jack, queen, and king). Obviously the value will be on the card but it's nice to be able to easily tell them apart. I'm not sure how the ace comes in this as the ace of spades is usually different to the rest of the aces.

It might be best to stick to a more traditional design with spade/club/heart/diamond symbols for the numerical cards and an illustration for the court cards. Having said that, you could always try making the symbols more "jellified" and maybe putting faces on them. Also, children can use the symbols on the cards to learn basic numbers.

 

I agree. Different illustrations for each card would be nice to look at but impractical to play with (as well as being a lot of work to make).

 

3 hours ago, GarryP said:

And, not everyone uses Roman numerals so if you don't know what an "8" is you can still count up the number of symbols to put the cards in order.

 

I think you mean Arabic numerals, not Roman. ;) (Just to add to the confusion, written Arabic actually uses Indian numerals instead of the ones that we call 'Arabic'.)

 

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15 hours ago, Alfred said:

I think you mean Arabic numerals, not Roman.

Absolutely correct. Well caught. No idea what I was thinking about at the time. (That happens quite a lot.)

P.S. Isn't there also sometimes a card that has something to do with Cribbage too? I seem to remember that from way back.

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1 hour ago, GarryP said:

No idea what I was thinking about at the time. (That happens quite a lot.)

 

Same here, Garry! :o

 

1 hour ago, GarryP said:

P.S. Isn't there also sometimes a card that has something to do with Cribbage too? I seem to remember that from way back.

 

I vaguely recall having being taught how to play cribbage, but I never played it much and the only detail I remember now is the cribbage board with pegs in it. I'm pretty sure that standard playing cards are used.

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23 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I vaguely recall having being taught how to play cribbage, but I never played it much and the only detail I remember now is the cribbage board with pegs in it. I'm pretty sure that standard playing cards are used.

 

Perfectly normal, you just need to be able to identify the 4 suits and particularly the nob

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I was taught how to play cribbage by my Nana - along with whist and some very odd solitaire games - but I can't remember what the rules are now either. I think we still have her board somewhere in the loft (we used matches as pegs).

I think the extra card in the packs we used was all text and there's a good chance that it was a cut-down version of the rules for bridge, not cribbage as I said earlier. I think most people just threw it away. Some quick searches on the web have given me no further information. Maybe it's just my broken memory.

P.S. I've just found this article about four-colour packs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-color_deck which kinda goes against the two-colour suits "rule" mentioned above but it's probably best to keep to two colours anyway.

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