Welcome to the Capstone Gaming blog! I’m glad you stopped by! In this first post, I’m excited to introduce my new blog and what I’m hoping to accomplish during CS467. Although this blog will usually focus on my team’s capstone project, for the first post I wanted to share why I am passionate about this project and document a few thoughts on what I hope the project end-state looks like.  

My Obsession

When perusing the list of available projects, one particular request immediately caught my eye as a unique opportunity. To ensure I captured the projected, I needed two like-minded individuals. Luckily, using the class discussion list, I found two individuals who shared my immediate enthusiasm for this project. We quickly formed a team and signed up for the trading card project, a project where we will create a tool to generate trading cards. Sharing two pictures should fully explain why I am excited about this project:

I own a lot of games. A LOT of games. What’s not shown is that this collection extends onto another shelf. I love games. 

Existing Tools

I love games so much that I spent my summer designing and creating a new game. My game is a card-centric endeavor that I’m hoping hits kickstart next year. Because I needed an extensive set of cards, I spent a significant amount of time looking at the current market for card-generation software. Turns out, the market is really small, consisting of only a single dedicated solution called nanDeck (nanDECK | Code your graphics). Other card designers recommended using Illustrator or Adobe. However, I believe nanDeck is the only software designed solely for making playing cards.

Nandeck is a pretty good open-source tool with a comprehensive. You can add images, replace strings with icons, set the number of cards generated, and import CSV data. Best of all, Nandeck is free to use.

Although the generally robust, the software’s bugs can result in critical failures when trying to print cards. The worst bug, a pointer error, renders the software unusable when encountered. The software also looks dated and needs a serious UX upgrade.

Defining Success

I’m looking forward to seeing the client requirements, but I hope that a successful project will include connecting to a datasource, allowing customization of layouts and display of text and images. The program will need an option to print the cards and save them to a file for future editing. Hopefully, the feature set will be rich enough that I can test the software using my own game. 

If you can’t tell, I’m excited to get started and work on this project with a great team. The team will have a lot of fun working together and creating software that will have a big impact on this niche market. We will at least have fun discovering how to actually build this software. I can’t wait to share with you what I learn and the progress our team makes.  

See you next blog post!