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Mechanic Monday: Futzing with nanDECK

Hello hello hello, it’s time for another TTR- wait, what day is it? It’s Monday? Not Tuesday? But that would make this… dear God… a Mechanic Monday? In this economy?

In truth, I don’t have a fun new game mechanic I wanted to noodle out today (a few in the hopper though, I should get on those)(holy shit my last Mechanic Monday was like 14 months ago), as I’ve spent the last few hours tinkering about and learning nanDECK, and my brain’s a bit fried but I wanted to get my thoughts together.

First off, it’s a cool tool.  Free, runs on my work computer, or off a USB drive, some great tutorials (shout out to Ryan Langewisch of Ludo Lodge), and boyyyyy does templating cut down on the repetitive work.  I’ve been using Fantasy GM Squared as my test, as I want to completely change layouts/formats from the one that’s in my existing prototypes, and this seems the perfect chance to try out some new ones without having to painstakingly redo every card.  I spent the day taking the old table that held all the card data in the middle of a Google Doc, put it into a spreadsheet (after defining the columns a bit better to suit my planned layout[s] in nanDECK) and poking around the basic unit and display settings, and then this evening I actually went downloaded the CSV and tried linking it and getting it to display various objects that corresponded to my columns.  Some mixed results! Lost a LOT of time because I didn’t cotton on to that crucial little “key length” field in Icons.  But still, promising - I just need to reconsider how I display all my little icons, and honestly, what the priority of information is.  And I should get at least a few standin images to go where art will eventually go, just so I can actually properly visualize the proportions of the icons to the illustrations to the text etc etc.

GOOD LORD note to self remember to do a find and replace all to change all the numerals-icons to multiples of the same icon.

All in all, I like it a lot.  It’ll take some getting used to (and even then, it’s not without some quirks that I don’t think will ever quite gel for me) but it’s about time I graduated out of… um… Microsoft Word and Paint as my main design tools.  For the automation, if nothing else.

I’ll leave you with some possible card layouts, then go cool off and get some rest.  Take it easy and have a good week!





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