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Game art: img directory

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Game File Reference


Useful Components

Official

  • Deck: a PHP component to manage cards (deck, hands, picking cards, moving cards, shuffle deck, ...).
  • Draggable: a JS component to manage drag'n'drop actions.
  • Counter: a JS component to manage a counter that can increase/decrease (ex: player's score).
  • ExpandableSection: a JS component to manage a rectangular block of HTML than can be displayed/hidden.
  • Scrollmap: a JS component to manage a scrollable game area (useful when the game area can be infinite. Examples: Saboteur or Takenoko games).
  • Stock: a JS component to manage and display a set of game elements displayed at a position.
  • Zone: a JS component to manage a zone of the board where several game elements can come and leave, but should be well displayed together (See for example: token's places at Can't Stop).

Undocumented component (if somebody knows please help with docs)

  • Wrapper: a JS component to wrap a <div> element around its child, even if these elements are absolute positioned.

Unofficial


Game Development Process


Guides for Common Topics


Miscellaneous Resources

Metadata images

Game metadata images are images of game box, banner, tiltle, etc. These images are no longer stored in project directory.

Metadata images are managed through the Game Metadata Manager. After you go there select the link to the game you want to upload images for.

Game art

You must upload in img directory all images of your game interface.

Images naming constraints

To be correctly deployed your images file names should not contain spaces or parentheses.

Images loading

Be careful: by default, ALL images of your img directory are loaded on a player's browser when he loads the game. For this reason, don't let in your img directory images that are not useful, otherwise it's going to slowdown the game load.

Note that you can tune the way images are loaded with Javascript method "dontPreloadImage" (see Game Interface Logic).

General recommendation it to have no more than dozen of image files, 2Mb max each. However if there is heavy game resources specific to a player (i.e. player board of specific color or set of cards) it is better to separate them and "don't pre-load" since in any given game only some of them will be used.

Images format

You can use these image formats while building your game interface:

jpg images

should be used for non-transparent images. Jpg are usually lighter than Pngs, so please choose Jpg for big pictures (ex: game board, cards) when you don't need transparency to accelerate game load. You don't need transparency for rounded card corners, it can be done using css.

png images

should be used for images with transparency, such as non-square tokens, meeples, etc (combined into sprite).

gif images

can be used for animated images. This is not recommended to use gif animated images as they can upset players, but for some specific interface element this could be useful.

svg images

svg images can be really efficient for icons or abstract images

Use background-size

In order to allow for players to use the browser zoom without your images becoming pixelated, it's recommended to use higher resolution images than needed for the normal display of your interface, and to use the css property background-size to fit the image to the size you need for your interface.

Use CSS Sprites

To limit the number of images load and make the game load faster, you must use CSS sprites, i.e. you must gather several images in a single one. However, there are limitations. Do not make any CSS image sprite with dimensions that exceed 4096x4096 pixels or it will not work on mobile devices (Android max texture size is 4096 pixels, test your own browser at WebGL Report).

To learn more on CSS Sprites:

Important: the maximum image size should be 4096x4096 (otherwise, some devices may not display parts of the image, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34682482/what-is-the-maximum-sprite-sheet-size-i-can-use-for-android-devices)

Tools:

Shrink images

If you get high resolution images from publisher you need to shrink them since web display requires much lower resolution than printing.

Image Manipulation Tools

You have no choice but to use one of the image manipulating tools to create a successful game adaptation, you would have to deal with

  • Converting to supported formats
  • Adding transparency
  • Stitching
  • Shrinking with no quality loss
  • Resizing

For that you need a good tools, recommended tools (if you know more add them here)

  • Gimp (all platforms) - general GUI image editor
  • Paint.net (Windows) - general GUI image editor
  • ImageMagic (All platforms) - https://www.imagemagick.org/script/download.php - command line image editor, great for mass manipulations and scripting


Examples

PDF to png convertion (linux) 

gs -sDEVICE=pngalpha   -o output.png -r600 -dDownScaleFactor=3 input.pdf

PSD Extraction (image magic - CMYK to sRBG - one layer per file) 

for i in *.psd; do  convert  $i -profile /usr/share/color/icc/colord/sRGB.icc   `basename $i .psd`.png; done;


Tiling 

montage -colorspace sRGB -density 300 *.png -tile 6 -background transparent ../tokens.png

PDF scrabber (linux) - extract all graphics file from pdf 

pdfimages my.pdf prefix-


Online tools

PSD extraction (adobe file format) 

https://www.photopea.com/


Seamless background (for tiled background wallpaper) 

https://www.imgonline.com.ua/eng/make-seamless-texture-result.php
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