• A Colors TCG (fake) deck template for GIMP users
  • What is this?
  • Creating decks
  • Exporting individual cards
  • Feedback

A Colors TCG (fake) deck template for GIMP users

What is this?

It’s a template for (fake) Colors decks saved in .xcf format. This makes the process of creating (fake) decks easier for GIMP users. The usual PSD provided can be opened in GIMP, but the text layers and layer masks don’t seem to be translated properly, so it takes more time to crop the individual card images and add the deck name. The instructions below assume some familiarity with GIMP but probably not that much.

I’m calling it a “(fake) deck template” as I’ve only ever made fake decks and therefore don’t know if there is some higher standard for real deck creation that this template perhaps doesn’t meet.

Creating decks

• Install the font provided here (04b24.ttf).
• Open the template.xcf file in GIMP.
• Click on the layer named “dark colour” (the purple rectangle on the left, not the black and white one on the right). Set the colour to the darker colour you’ve chosen for the deck. Select the paintbrush tool and set it to a huge size, then swipe it over the canvas to fill it and the purple should be replaced by the chosen colour. Select the layer called “50%” (again, the left rectangle) and do the same again (this time you should see no real effect at this point).
• Click on the layer named “light colour” (the orange rectangle on the left). Set your colour to the lighter colour you want to use. Fill the canvas using a massive paintbrush again, and the orange should be replaced by that colour.
• Switch to the text editing tool, double click each of the text layers, press Ctrl+A to select the entire text and replace “deck name” with the deck name each time. You shouldn’t need to adjust the position of the text for any of these.
• If you’re making a regular deck, delete or hide the layer labelled “white (special)”. If it’s a special deck, do this with the layer called “white (regular)” instead.
• To add card images, click on each of the numbered layers in the “card images” group (again, click the rectangle on the left, not the mostly black one on the right). Now paste in the image. If you are on GIMP 3, you will need to do this by going to the Edit menu and choosing “Paste As Floating Data”. If you’re on GIMP 2, a normal Ctrl+V will do. Once the image is pasted in and scaled and repositioned to your liking, right-click its icon in the layers list and then choose the option to anchor the floating layer.
• The rest is the time-consuming part, although I think painting individual pixels can sometimes be quite fun. Select the layer called “text borders” and zoom in to 800%. Set the darker colour and choose the pencil tool, set size to 1, set to the “pixel” brush and, if you’re on GIMP 2, hard edge. Now for each occurrence of the deck name text, in every place where a white pixel touches the top or bottom of its container, paint a pixel of the darker colour over the lighter colour where it is adjacent to this white pixel. See the image below for an example.

• Then find the layer called “50%”. This time, click the black rectangle. Set the colour to white. Paint the pixel to the left and right of every one of the pixels you just painted. This will show up as a semi-transparent version of the darker colour.

Here’s the (slight but noticeable) difference that this causes: card 1 has no pixels painted on here, card 2 has the solid ones, and card 3 has these plus the 50% opacity ones. This improves the legibility of the text.

Exporting individual cards

If you have ImageMagick installed and the means to run a shell script, you can use convert.sh to automatically create the individual card images. Export the full image as a PNG, e.g. deckname.png. Then run ./convert.sh deckname.png and the individual GIFs will be created. Disclaimer: I’ve tested this on Debian only.

Feedback

Email me, any reasonable address @praze.net, or I guess comment on my trade post.