The Making of the Missing Link Expansion

There are two types of Highlander Dreamcards that can be designed :
- New cards for existing immortals or new Generic cards
- Cards for brand new immortals
 
 
 

Existing Immortals and Generic cards

Emptying the card Background
It is possible to scan and use a real card from Thunder Castle Games and to use the resulting jpeg picture as a base for your picture. The first step is then to empty the card picture from its text in order to keep only an empty usable background. Have a look at the Kalas Power Blow pictures.

By multiple and careful copy/paste operations, it is possible to remove all the text and to leave only a nice background. The main problem here is  is that you may get visible limits around your paste areas. Have a look at another Kalas card (Click Here) with an empty text. You will see that the title part of the card is pretty good-looking but that the effect text has clearly visible marks of such paste areas.

A possible secret trick is to use tiny blur filters (or better a directional blur) located specifically around the limits of your paste areas. It will allow a smoother transition and a much less visible limit. The same Kalas card uses this trick in the title are where no clear limit is visible.

Once you have a cool empty background, the next step is to build all the fancy stuff that you can put on Highlander cards such as card type icons, signature or reserved icons, attack/defense/combat trick icons :

It is easy to scan the icons you need then to remove the border (card background around the icon) and to keep only the icons themselves. For attack/defense grids, it is also necessary to divide the icon into grid squares and get the corresponding squares with an empty background (black with some bevel for relief). The following example shows that by mixing a full green grid and an empty grid (plus some color change), you get a new combat trick icon :
Then you can add some special icon that can be used as a signature to show it is not a real TCG picture but a player Dreamcard :

Building the Card
Once you have an empty background and the icons you need for a complete series of card, you may choose nice picture that will fit the card title or theme. For the Kalas Eiffel tower, a basic picture of the Eiffel tower by night may be used. You can see the basic pix HERE.

Then, you must crop and resize the picture in order to fit the area expected by your card background. The next step is to transform the corners of this pictures into round corners. Then you must add a basic bevel filter to put to relief to the picture, and a black glow around the card.

So from the Eiffel tower picture above, you can obtain this picture :

Then you can put all pieces together to obtain a cool Kalas Eiffel Tower card. You can note that the card below is different from the "real" MLE Eiffel Tower card since it has a Situation icon instead of the Location it should have.



 
 
New Immortals

Building a new Background

For new immortals the procedure is slightly harder since it is necessary to build a whole new background from "basic" pictures of the Immortal. The first step is to choose a high resolution picture that can be used as background. Let's take Cracker Bob for example :
Once the basic picture is cropped/resized down to the size of a real card, you must cut its corners in order to get round corners (check this step on the Eiffel tower above). Then you must add somme bevel for relief and a small border around the picture. In the following picture, there is a small brown border around the beveled picture :



From the same picture, a couple of copy/paste operations will create the title and effect text areas. Another bevel and black glow operations on these two areas will end the background creation step.



Building the Card

Then you can add the basic icons, and text and tiny stuff necessary to build your pictures. You get the following result :



 
 
 
 
 
he next step is to choose a picture that will fit the card title or theme of your card and use it to build the virtual card. Like for the Eiffel Tower, it is first necessary to crop/resize the picture to have it fit into the desired area of the background, then a bevel/black glow combo will end the picture process.
And you get your first picture for Cracker Bob. Note that the following card is also different from the real Cracker Bob Back Away since it is a Signature card.

If you want any other advice or information on virtual card designing, you may check the About page and send your questions to the MLE Team.