Oops... I posted it because I thought it was a great idea/presso/product and the HN community would be a good place to get feedback from. Apologies if it was premature!
Disappointed only because it looks interesting. Also, I think many people have been burned by email address harvesting pages that have great ideas but never materialized.
Something seems unfinished with the column-to-position associations. Maybe they need some more style to communicate the purpose a bit clearer? (e.g. representing the columns-to-positions in a table style, or more vertical padding separation, or referencing positions by letter (A, B, C, etc.) instead of by #).
We would agree. The UI itself is still evolving rapidly, the core functionality just finally came together and got useful. Ideally, we get feedback during this process that helps us nail down the most important workflows and give it a serious UX paint job.
That particular feature seems sort of backwards to me; might just be me, but I think it might be more straightforward to list the places you can put things on the template and have a <select> allowing you to pick columns from your CSV for each spot (default to nothing in a spot)
Right now it is Prawn[0]. It slowly evolved from a script a year ago, where it was fine. We are considering switching to an HTML->PDF workflow, though, since I have to render all of this stuff in the web for quicker previews anyway!
Thanks for the clean design mention, we owe it mostly to Zurb Foundation[1]. Using those modal popovers to control the user's attention has really helped me narrow the UI variables.
Stick with Prawn, as it is sanity saving for this task. For web based previews, use GraphicsMagick and Postscript to turn the PDF into a gif or image. One command line, takes half a second. Saves you from doing CSS hell on layout, where the preview pixel wise matching the print data really matters for your app.
Thanks for the tip, Patrick! I had heard the html->pdf tools were pretty good, but you're absolutely right about the pixel precision needs. I got my Prawn setup into a reasonable state pretty early, and it's be Mostly Fine, Just Fine.
I really love this concept and it looks really well executed. One thing I think would be really slick would be to live update the template as you pair columns with locations on the card, using the first row from the CSV for content in the preview
I'd like to see special symbols rendered in the text flow - e.g. power points icon with a number superimposed. Like "The flug hit you for <hiticon>5</hiticon> pts damage"
Hard in gimp - text layout is not directly available as a method separate from fonts. And fonts cant do color in Gimp. So have to parse text, look for tags, insert icons, do your own word wrap etc. All in Lisp. Yuck.
Manufacturing is out of scope for this product, at current. It is firmly a prototyping tool, not a production tool. The idea is to make it trivial for designers to iterate so they will do more of it. More iterations means better games, faster, and we all win.
I use GIMP scripts for this. Instead of spreadsheet, just a call with arguments separated by commas like this:
(UrNammu-new-craftsman 1 "2Baubles.png" "Fleece the Tourist" "Got his pants! Gain 2 Baubles" "Google Images")
We print using thegamecrafter.com, which is a little struggle because our decks have 100+ cards, and they require EACH CARD to be 'proofed' by hand on their laggy webpage. Proofing 1 card is enough for our software-generated cards, they all align exactly the same vs the template.
This is impressive, I keep meaning to learn to script Gimp and Inkscape, sometimes I think web apps are the only way I can think anymore...
Great point about thegamecrafter, we had the same problem. We want to try their API though, as Paperize could dump entire prototypes in there at once. Makes it a lot easier on your playtesters, too!
You've gone a long way, putting it on a web page. Doing it 'by hand' doesn't help anybody but us. I've been thinking about doing what you're doing; I'm just glad you're doing it!
Hey, if you could automate 'proofing' cards while you're dumping to thegamecrafter, that would be wonderful.
I tend to use HTML to create my prototypes in. I find that it's a pretty good medium for the purpose and there are plenty of developer tools around that makes it easy to work with. Plus it's easy to script.
When I must render a webpage to PNG, I use Phantomjs and a rasterize.js script. I've been very pleased with it, even when generating very large images (10,000px squared or more).
Very interesting! However, I think the landing page should be clearer. No customer watches a 9:00 minutes video of a product, no matter how good it is. I'd switch to a 30 seconds promo (who are we? Why do you need us?) and keep the longer one for users who already know the product – they are hooked – and look for the nitty-gritty details.
Yes! That's what's fun, now you can easily imagine a re-skin of all kinds of simple games, just go find some fun graphics on the web and click "print".
I want to get an interface going on mobile so you can just snap pictures with your phone to add card art on the fly.
I agree! Totally didn't expect this to get big today, but very glad it did! Once we're done gathering requirements from the hardcore game designers we're targeting, we'll revert that page to something a little sexier.
Not relevant to the tool, but he kept saying in the video that the game has 16 cards even though he proceeded to create 17 cards (5 + 1 + 1 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 + 2).
We hope to start inviting early adopters in in March to do final tweaking and load testing. We'll probably go to beta invites as soon as we think it's stable and useful. From there, it goes where the users take us!
Yep, I submitted my email address. It's great stuff.
Would be amazing if you had a Cards Against Humanity template too. We have an info set we're looking to print for our own personal use, but I can't seem to find a good template gen and don't have the time to learn gimp commands.
We were wondering if we were going to get any CAH requests. That's an easy thing for us to do, we just weren't sure about letting the product turn into that instead of a serious design tool.
I think CAH is probably some low-hanging fruit to at least get people to your site (though I'm probably bias because I am looking for it), but your the real differentiator is that you support full templates. Just keep advertising it as is.
The web route isn't locked - I used the URL in the video and was able to log in. When it failed on csrf, it let me create a deck anyways.
Also, I noticed that if you don't have complete http:// url's it doesn't load images. For example, the following URL works in browser but not in paperize:
For future reference, when you're pasting something long into an HN comment add a blank line and two spaces before it so it doesn't make the page massively wide:
53 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadSomething seems unfinished with the column-to-position associations. Maybe they need some more style to communicate the purpose a bit clearer? (e.g. representing the columns-to-positions in a table style, or more vertical padding separation, or referencing positions by letter (A, B, C, etc.) instead of by #).
Thanks for the clean design mention, we owe it mostly to Zurb Foundation[1]. Using those modal popovers to control the user's attention has really helped me narrow the UI variables.
0: http://prawnpdf.org 1: http://foundation.zurb.com
That feature is definitely on the short list, we have lots to do in terms of surfacing the data in the designs in a more "live" fashion.
Great point about thegamecrafter, we had the same problem. We want to try their API though, as Paperize could dump entire prototypes in there at once. Makes it a lot easier on your playtesters, too!
Hey, if you could automate 'proofing' cards while you're dumping to thegamecrafter, that would be wonderful.
Also, I then do some afterprocessing in imagemagick.
I want to get an interface going on mobile so you can just snap pictures with your phone to add card art on the fly.
Edit: Nevermind. I was able to use it :)
FYI, you get a csrf error when logging in with a google account.
Right now the only way to be considered for early access is to fill out our feedback form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1pGhxa1NvBmqVvV4tPt0YTiUcDRx...
Would be amazing if you had a Cards Against Humanity template too. We have an info set we're looking to print for our own personal use, but I can't seem to find a good template gen and don't have the time to learn gimp commands.
Then again what does "serious" even mean.
Custom templates would be rad too.
Also, I noticed that if you don't have complete http:// url's it doesn't load images. For example, the following URL works in browser but not in paperize:
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So I guess our first end-user impression has already happened! I hope it was good for you.
Anything else you wish we had templates for?