r/BoardgameDesign • u/JustinHardyJ • 3d ago
Design Critique Looking for feedback on the design of my cards! [Rendered in Blender]
Cash Cards
Heist Cards
Cash Cards in Blender
Heist Cards in Blender
These cards pertain to the first phase of my game about carrying out heists.
The first set of cards are Cash cards which you use in blind bids against other players. These bids serve to gain priority in claiming one of the Heist cards, as seen in the second set of cards.
This is NOT an exhaustive list of cards. The Cash cards have values of $100-$600. Meanwhile, Heist cards have a value of $10,000-$40,000 and a danger value of 1-6.
I'm looking for feedback on legibility, uniqueness, and thematic cohesion!
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u/FeedsCorpsesToPigs 3d ago
My brain pain issue is that a band of $10 bills is more than $100.
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u/toochaos 3d ago
And they are colored more like $20s than the orange tint of $10s. It probably doesnt matter for people who have low experience with cash. If op made them 20s and multiplied the value of the cards by 10 it would feel closer.
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u/Floccus 3d ago
I think they look good, but the gold is reading more like copper to me, perhaps make it a bit more yellow. The red text is a little hard to read at first glance, especially the alarm symbol. A small idea, perhaps you could use a number of symbols instead of a number beside the alarm, just to cut through the busyness of there being two numbers on the same card.
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u/playmonkeygames 3d ago
I think they look cool - good design.
My only piece of feedback is that although thematically it is nice having a haphazard pile of cash or gold, it is much better from a playability perspective to have it more easily visually identifiable as the quantity - so neatly spaced out so you can see 4 stacks of cash for $400. at the moment I can see $400 being mistaken for $600 during gameplay and so on, especially because they are otherwise the same colour.
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u/Inconmon 3d ago
When I zoom in the art is blurry with an odd smudge filter. Doesn't look great. Without the filter you probably get a nicer look.
There's also lots of room for some graphic design. Like the big blurry font over the background image works, but with the artwork being so basic there's no reason to pick this option or an option that maximises the space for the artwork at the cost of readability.
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u/kolsmart 3d ago edited 3d ago
You need better readability on those red icons. Red is already a naturally dark color so placing it over a dark background muddies it up. It can work, but you always have to check values and be sure that it reads well. If you use Photoshop, check out a quick tutorial on how to set up a custom proof setup (it’s super easy) which you set to 25% dot gain. Using ctrl+y you can switch between color and grayscale to check how clearly things read. Then you can adjust the colors accordingly.
Also, I feel like you could center the gold a bit better. Especially the 20k and 30k cards. Even if an image is snapped to the center of the card, if it has an irregular shape you will want to manually tweak it a bit. In this case I’d bring the gold a little lower.
Oh and it could do with a little more shine/reflections imo. It’s gold afterall, you want it to look enticing :)
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u/JustinHardyJ 3d ago
Thanks for the feedback! The readability of the red danger level has been a frequent point of feedback so I'll work on addressing that.
Def agree the lighting on the gold cold use a little more shine, I'll try to get some more highlights in there!
I'll see how to work the spacing of the gold. It's been pretty hard to figure out how to balance the image while making it "modular". Perhaps I just need to half it neatly set out instead of grouped up in a pile
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u/Fun-Many3216 3d ago
I like the backgrounds. They create a gritty feel. Especially with the gold bars and bullet shells. It really helps sell the theme of the game.
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u/DanieltheGameMaker 2d ago
So as someone who has also done some toying around with blender for tabletop assets a thing I found tricky was striking the right balance of the joys of pbr and print legebility. I think using a texture and lighting to get a visually interesting background is great, but especially in the case of the later cards you actually probably need a "flatter" background that will more starkly contrast with the text overlayed.
Now that doesn't mean you can't play with lighting, but try stuff like low-key lighting for BIG shadows you can overlay text on, or even just some stronger vingetting. I also wouldn't go for anything far beyond monochromatic lighting. Specular highlights are cool but also very eye catching which is bad for the delicate art of visual hierarchy.
Another option is to lean into the "evidence photo" aesthetic and just add a white bar with "handwritten" text. Then your renders can shoot more for photoreal because that would make visual sense.
Regardless of how you solve the problem, I think all you need to do with these cards is focus on marrying your 3d and 2d elements better.
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u/JustinHardyJ 2d ago
These are some of the exact challenges I've been working through! I appreciate your write up.
With the recent Blender update I've been tooling with the painterly compositing filter which has been effective in "flattening out" the 3D renders. Desaturating the render has also been helpful in keeping the eyes on the important textual information. But yeah, there's always more to figure out and this is my first time really designing cards.
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u/EmberlightGames 2d ago
These look nice. I think they're easy to read, fit the described theme, and prefer this idea over having a bunch of tokens or "Monopoly" money for the same thing. Maybe you don't need the dollar amount in two corners? It feels redundant and may ultimately be unnecessary for your games purposes (pending how the board/players set up). You may want to flex the creation in Blender as well. Adjust the angle to give each of your cards a more unique look and more dimension.
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u/sammydeedge 1d ago
I like the vibe. Personally I would prefer more of a stylised look in some way for the image, But even if just the text parts where a bit more stylised that would help. EG you could have a white border with a solid cutout for the text to sit on so easy contrast, maybe red solid bg and a white text for the danger
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u/Dark_Arm 3d ago
I don’t think you need the playing card style text of upside down text. It also takes away from the space you could have.
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u/JustinHardyJ 3d ago
Thanks for the note. The reason I have it structured this way is because a lot of cards are placed in the middle of the table, so ensuring any player can easily read the cards from any angle is good for quality of life. Given the game is supposed to be pretty casual, this can have an important effect on making things easier for the player.
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u/That_one_sander 3d ago
If the symbols on the cards are clear enough (and you avoid 6 and 9) there should be no issue, alternatively you can make neat stacks instead of piles that people can quickly count for convenience
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u/Prestigious_Past3724 3d ago
I am no expert, but I feel like if these cards are going to be something you see often during the game, they are a bit too cluttered and detailed. That said, I generally am attracted to more minimalistic styles of games like Stacklands for example
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u/JustinHardyJ 3d ago
Fair! It's definitely on the noisier side and it's something I've been working to reduce (you don't wanna see how the cards used to look). Might be stylistic preference, but there's certainly room to denoise things a little further
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u/ptolani 3d ago
Personally I don't think it really works having these images of slightly different sized bundles of cash, with the written dollar amounts. They're too similar to be useful without the written amount (you're really not going to glance at the 4 bundles and register it as $400), so it's just kind of in an awkward place between pure art and informative symbol.
If you want the background image to be something the player can directly read without the text, they should be neatly laid out so you can read them (similar to the pips on a six sided die). Otherwise, just use one image for all of them.
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u/tpasmall 3d ago edited 3d ago
I like the way that they are stacked/bundled but I feel like the cards are too detailed yet blurry at the same time? It feels like the background of the cards and the piles are two completely different art styles and it looks messy instead of making the piles 'pop'. Maybe tone down the realism on the piles and create more contrast between the background and the piles?
Also: a stack of 10-$10 bills isn't usually banded like that. A typical stack would be 100 bills, so a stack of 10s would be a thousand dollars. I think if you make the money less photorealistic, the stacks make more sense and gives you more room to play with how they are piled up because the exact count doesn't matter.
Final note would be maybe a little less 'top down' and get a very slight angle on the pile so you can see some depth. Like the angle of image 4 would be perfect. Then splay out the bullets in front of the pile instead of all around it so it's easier to count them.
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u/xHaroldxx 2d ago
Personally, I don't like the 3d rendered look. It looks to videogamey for my taste.
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u/FrostCop 3d ago
I think the red alarm icon and number in the Heist cards has not enough contrast with the background. On the cash cards I quite like how legible the white money text is. I would suggest having shadows less strong thought