I know exactly what you mean ^
Anyway, I really hope the guidelines for this project go in the right direction.  This could be the coolest collab idea ever.  How about owning a deck of cards where you can say, "this card is my pixel art" 

Here's some more rule suggestions.
----------------------------------

Card artwork should use every color in the palette.

Card artwork should be one picture, so no comics.

Card artwork may NOT be a game mockup. Do not depict any GUI-elements etc
in your card.

Card artwork should have simple background made of white and one other light color.
All cards in suit should have same background-colors.

All cards should use somewhat similar style. Artist should be willing to try to use
'the common style' instead of 'whatever he is most comfortable with'.
So no isometric dimetric, trimetric.
no habbo-hotel-style, no super-deformed, no anime, no cartoony.
Unless, of course, that is what was chosen to be the common style.

I'd also like to change my suggestion of sub themes from
items/places/transportation/characters/ace-design
to
items/pets&other-animals/places&transportation/characters/ace-design

Some kind of draft of todo-list
--------------------------------

we should...

1) Decide what we want from this collaboration. Do we want to have as wide representation
of pixelart styles as possible where artist gets to choose whatever style and colors he feels most
comfortable with? Or do we want more unified look where all artists try their best to use one shared style
and set of colors? Or something between the extremes.
Personally I like the idea of more unified look.

2) Decide card size (in pixels) and other measurements that surt has
already talked about in his posts. Resolution should be small enough so that pixels are clearly
visible when printed.
Personally I like the 90x126 px resolution.

3) Decide what 'the common style' is, if any. Maybe draw some reference pics.
Like the scale and light-source pic for iso-ology collab.

4) Decide palettes for suits. Palettes can have common colors, or even be exactly
the same. Some (or even all) colors may be left for artist to choose.
I'd suggest that common colors would be low saturation grays and browns etc
and each suit would have simple ramp of one bright high saturation color.

5) Decide themes for suits, and maybe subthemes too... Or just allow anyone draw whatever they
want.

6) Decide a set of index symbols & numbers that are used in all the cards.
I think these should be relatively simple and easy to read. So functional instead of super
flashy.

7) Decide how many cards artist may make, and how many they must make to participate. What do
we do if we do not get enough participants to get every card? What do we do if we require 4 cards/artist
and someone does only 3 and then disappears from the internet?
Personally I would like that each artist would make same amount of cards. Optimally one card / artist,
but I understand that this might not be possible.

8) Decide on ways to ensure quality. Who decides when card is good enough? Who decides when the card is in
'the common style'? What do we do if someone does not reach the required level of quality. Should there be some kind of voting system?

--------------

Here's another suggestion for the palette.


So browns yellows and grays for common, and on bright color / suit.
Note how none of the example pictures would be suitable for card artwork
according to my own rules suggestions... :)


Edited by zch - 16 October 2011 at 3:30pm

maybe the decks shouldnt be sold ...
just publish a .pdf or whatever which people can download
the printing process should then be everybodys own concern...
or is this project about making money?

Its not about the money, but it is just very hard to print a set of cards yourself. Even harder if you only want 1 copy.

or someone could program some kind of 'solitaire' game including this very deck

come on ! that'd be nice!

:D

dig it!

This is a good solution. Does anyone have a card game code or know how to go about getting one?

If it were to be on PJ as a project or main link it would most likely need to be a Javascript or similar. I can double-check with Sedge if anything is found we can use before we proceed.

It would be awesome if members can play online and a high-score database is included in the script.


Edited by jalonso - 20 October 2011 at 7:48am

That's a nice and simple game. Maybe only to simple?

I am not code savvy but there are many opensource and/or free codes out there. If we have someone who can edit or adjust to make this work please speak up.

I found THIS one which has many great features. Large images, several deck options, BGs etc. Its solitaire which is lame tho.

THIS (http://gpokr.com/#P O K E R) shows a card game with a great feature. Player icons and data which would be awesome. Images are too small.

Card code page where nothing makes sense to me

So yea, this is not something I can handle :(

Got an idea on how to make the normally non illustrated cards:

Question: why are we sticking to club/hearts/space/diamonds? Think out of the box! As long as we have 4 equally recognizable icons, the deck should work perfectly. Example:

All suits are worth the same in poker, and the chance of two different suit straight-flushes in one hand is astronomical (and in Hold 'em impossible) ;)

But agreed, I'd prefer regular symbols too. Hopefully the beautiful art will be distracting enough on its own! :)

Edited by DawnBringer - 04 November 2011 at 5:36pm

Bump.

Unless anyone else has found any good on demand card printers, in the interest of getting to a point where actual designs for cards can be made shall we work wih the sizing from the site Hapiel found? (Which uses 300 dpi)
https://community.thegamecrafter.com/publish/templates/cards/poker-cards

Does anyone else have any more ideas for suit themes? I understand that it is wanted to keep spades/clubs/hearts/diamonds, but we should be able to incorporate those elements into the art as in zch's post above.
Also, I propose to decide palettes after theme is chosen.

My suggestion for theme:
Spades: Digital/Futuristic
Hearts: Vegetation/Landscape
Diamonds: Sky/Weather
Clubs: Clockwork/Steampunk

I have also collected all of the previously suggested themes:
surt-
-Magenta, Hearts, Good alignment, Natural world
Yellow, Coins, Good alignment, Artificial world
Cyan, Mushrooms, Evil alignment, Natural world
Black, Skulls, Evil alignment, Artificial world
MyO-
-Pixels, Squares, Triangles and Circles
-Spammers, Nerds, Fools, Newbies
-Pencil, Pen, Floodfill, Dither
zch-
-Spades : purple / robots
Hearts : red / pirates
Diamonds : blue / ninjas
Clubs : green / zombies & woodoo
CELS-
-Diamonds - Prehistoric
Clubs - Medieval
Hearts - Renaissance
Spades - Modern
-Diamonds - Coins
Clubs - Clubs
Hearts - Cups
Spades - Swords
-Diamonds  - Fire
Clubs - Earth
Hearts - Water
Spades - Air
-clubs, hearts, spades and diamonds
-pizzas, panties, pickles and parrots

Edited by WolfKit - 12 December 2011 at 10:12pm

CELS, I have another suggestion. A community driven effort can also benefit from a community driven funding source. Why not run it as a crowd-sourced Kickstarter campaign? I mean, we can raise funds and give copies as campaign rewards (just enough funds for it to be published).

For this to happen, we first need an estimate of the exact costs of getting it printed. Running the campaign would be riskless, as if it fails, we don't need to print anything, but if it succeeds, we can pretty much send the money to whoever is responsible for getting in touch with the printing company. The printing company need not send it, as we would also be able to raise funds to cover logistics cost as well. Again, all should be planned well so that people get their exact money's worth (printing cost + delivery).

After the campaign is finished and all copies produced through it are given out, we can have open a website that sells more copies, though the problem is that since it is community driven, its hard to say who should benefit from it. So my thoughts are:
1) each deck sold would give royalties to all artists involved
2) if no one wants royalties, copies sold post-fund-raising should be given to a charitable organization
3) or both :)

I'm quite new here in pixeljoint and surely won't be submitting any of my own works (I'm a dev who joined to get in touch with pixel artists for collaborations). I just replied since I thought this solution could solve your problems.

I can offer assistance in other ways. If you ever need help running a Kickstarter campaign, on how we can make it successful, or even just help with anything else outside of drawing the cards, I could help you as a way of giving back to this community.

Like everyone, I don't want to get anything out of this, I'm just really interested in seeing this happen.

I have a long term programming project going where I'm making Romanian whist as an online multiplayer game using JavaScript on the client side (so it's playable in a browser), Node.JS on the server side, and WebSockets for communication.

Here's a screenshot:



I didn't implement any of the rules of the game yet, just the user/lobby functionality for creating new games or joining existing games.

This is a "weekend project", meaning I only work on it during weekends. But if anybody wants to join the programming side of it, be my guest. I had planned on releasing this under a free license anyway, when it was finished.