A little history…
Heresy began life as a google doc. In fact, the entire deck was originally written, without any imagery, in google docs. At some point we needed to move to a graphics toolset as one can only go so far without card graphics. After some consideration of potential tools we decided to write a deck “compositing” tool. Think LaTeX for T.I.M.E Stories decks. The result is a command line Python application that “builds” T.I.M.E Stories card images from a textual (XML) representation of a deck. A major advantage of this approach is that we can “rebuild” the cards for a deck from their source text and image assets at any time.
What can it do?
The Heresy, Python-based toolset is capable of laying out and rendering cards in various forms. It is capable of generating individual PNG files for the top and bottom of each card in the deck as well as Letter and A4 format PDF files of the whole deck and the composite PNG file ‘deck’ images used by Tabletop Simulator from the same XML source. The tool has the ability to generate cards padded out with the bleeding region needed for printing services like makeplayingcards.com.
How does it work?
The tools work on a ‘deck’ file, an XML formatted description of a T.I.M.E Stories deck. A deck contains lists of cards (e.g. Items, plans, characters, etc). Each card contains a set of text or image blocks that can be sized, rotated and placed on the card. Individual items have the concept of ‘depth’ which controls the compositing order of the various card elements. Finally, every type of card has a “default” card that it can inherit from as base layer. This makes it very easy to do things like add the item number to all item cards by adding it to the default card with a depth that ensures it is visible over (or under) other content.
The deck XML schema describes text styles and images as “assets” that can be referenced by name on the cards. One can even refer to subsections of a source image file as an image, making it very simple to crop out portions of a larger image (or a single image of a location into cards) and use them in additional places. We often import the Space Cowboys’ SDK at the start of a new scenario for consistency with other decks.
At the heart of the deck is the representation of a card face. Every card has a top and a bottom face with a different collection of renderable items. The final rendered card is a composite of the current card items and any items from the default card for the current card type. The items from the card and the default card are merged and sorted by depth (layers) that determine the order of the item compositing. There are rectangle, image and text items. The text item plays a key role as much of the story is told through these items. The text item allows for the application of “styles” to sections of text that are common over all cards (e.g. all item references should be bold and green). Text can include macros that substitute for actual card names, numbers, letters, etc. These are computed when the card is rendered and help make sure that moving things around leaves most links intact. Image objects can even be embedded (inline) into the text of a text item. In short enough functionality to cover the needs of the Heresy story.
Prerequisites
These tools are a work in progress, but if you are up for a challenge, we have opened up the tools so others can try to use them. The tools require Python 3.x with PyQt5 to run. At present, the primary tool is a command line deck builder. There is also a GUI deck builder being written (and available in the git repo), but folks working on Heresy found we did not need more that the command line tool. The tool itself is available in source code form via git (hosted on bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/frogboots/card_builder). The Heresy XML deck source was developed using git, but we have not yet opened that repository up to the public, we may someday.
–Have fun! The Heresy Team