"Maybe you're using some imaging software to make your cards one by one" Me, sweating: N-no, you must have me confused with someone else... Awesome video!
Just wanted to say thank you. I have been working on a game for over a year and it has taken so long mostly because I had the wrong tools. With your videos I have gotten more accomplished this week than in the last several months combined.
So glad to hear it, it is definitely easy to get in the weeds of game design and forget to take time to think about how you might improve your process and approach!
I literally send this link to everyone making a card game that doesn't know the good news (NaNDeck). Great tool to prototype rapidly! Thanks for the video.
Thanks a lot for this tutorial dude... I was spending a lot of time drawing every card but now, in 1 hour I have a deck of around 80 cards ready to print.
Thank you sooooo, so much! Just started out with Board Game Design the last couple weeks and when I found your video about nanDeck and the tutroials you just saved me a TON of time experimenting and testing and even developing cards & tiles for my designs. Oh man. Can't thank you enough. Or the nanDeck devlopers even. As a board game designer you get so much using this software. Generating like 60 cards with different effects just using excel and Ludo Lodge's Tutorial Explanations. Thanks a lot.
Great tutorial, super straightforward and to the point. After slogging through the text tutorials that were available to learn Nandeck last year, I'd taken some time away from designing and sorta forgotten how to use it. You really helped me shake the dust off, thanks!
Just watched this whole series before sitting down with nanDeck for the first time, and i can't thank you enough. super straightforward and easy to understand, awesome job! ^^
Thank you so much, I've avoided this program because I downloaded it years ago and just couldn't make heads or tails of anything. Decided to see if there were any worthwhile tutorials on it this time around and yours just made everything click (I'm not a programmer by any means). You're awesome.
This was literally perfect. I started today and wound up with a functional and clear prototype. I'd used a much jankier mail-merge-photoshop setup for my last prototype that had still removed most of the legwork, but we're talking the difference between days and a couple hours here. This tutorial gave me the *exact* amount of information I wanted (in conjunction with your other video on google spreadsheet integration and a comment there that confirmed how to reference multiple sheets in the same overarching spreadsheet). S-tier job, mate!
Thank you for this and your other nanDECK videos! I've been able to breathe new life into my game with the help of some easier prototyping methods (making everything by hand can be a bit taxing!). I really appreciate it!!
Thanks for the tutorials! You definitely helped me understand something better. I've tried twice to use Nandeck and gave up twice. Definitely going to try again now.
Thanks so much this is a blessing ^^. I was trying to figure out the program myself but I quickly remembered I'm not good with programming stuff anyway. Tried to find guides but a lot of them just didn't work for me, got confused or something. This is super clear.
For anyone who wants the first few lines for their nanDECK script, here they are: LINKMULTI = Count LINK = "nanDECK Tutorial.csv" ; Settings UNIT = INCH PAGE = 8.5, 11, PORTRAIT BORDER = RECTANGLE, #000000, 0.1 MARGINS = 0.5, 0.5, 0.1, 0.1
"I want it to be exactly the width of the card which is a little hard to do visually." Eh, you just need to toggle the snap-to-grid option in the bottom left corner. Still a good tutorial, thanks.
Great video! Thank you! Just getting into prototyping for a board game that has been in R&D for quite some time. Super excited to use this for the iterative design process! Was wondering if there is a way to round the corner on the Images. It seems that png files that are called to the cards must have sharp 90° corners.
Hey, this was a great tutorial! Just wondering, do you know if there's a way to display non-English text in nanDECK? By default it seems to just ignore it and only show English letters and numbers. Which is odd, because if I just input it into the text field it shows up. Anyways. Great tutorial.
Appreciate this vidoe. I'm wondering if NanDeck has any features that CardMaker doesn't have. I've been using CardMaker for years and NanDeck seems like a big step back, but maybe I'm missing something.
Hey very good Tutorial, it helped me a lot! But I have got 1 Problem: At 20:09 when I doubleclick the Text file, I dont get a list like in the video. To use the example from the video, it looked like this for me: [COST;COUNT;DESCRIPTION;IMAGE;NAME]. So I could only click on this one insertoption. Did anyone have similar problems and found a solution?
Cool, thanks. Are there any pitfalls to look out for if loading images? For example; they all need to have the same resolution and/or size if used in the same position.
Awesome tutorial, it really helped me to understand how things were set up and worked. I do have a question though that maybe you have the answer to. So I'm using nandeck to make some small tokens or like tiles. And on the bottom there are some icons. Well during gameplay those tiles get rotated and the new bottom will also have symbols. I am able to correctly orient the bottom, the right and the left. The top, however, is giving me troubles. I've tried to change the angle and tick the reverse box, but the closest I can get is to input the two keys for the icons in reverse order on my Google sheet. For an example, say I have a left arrow and a down arrow on the top and the bottom. I use the key LD in Google sheets. On the tile I want the arrows to be upside down on the top when looking at it in the default orientation. Anytime I angle and reverse it either has the icons backwards or switches their order and I can't seem to get the orientation correct and in the same order without switching my key DL in Google sheets.
Interesting... it is hard to say without jumping in to nanDECK to mess around a bit, but my first instinct would have been to set the angle of the ICONS directive to 180? I'm guessing you are setting it to 90 and either -90 or 270 for the left and right sides. Let me know if you figured anything out on this, I can maybe give it a try sometime.
Great tutorial! I have a question, when I tried doing this for multiple images, some images were bigger than others but when I try to make them smaller, it also makes the already smaller images to the same size as the big image I made small, any help as to how to circumvent this?
I’ve run across a hurdle… I have a number templates for each card type with a little colour on them. When I add text boxes for card name, etc, the box is white and blocks the template below it. How can I make the text box transparent and keep the text itself opaque?
Thanks for the video! When I try to use just the "name" field from my CSV on a text box, it imports EVERYTHING from my .csv. I had it set up just like your spreadsheet. Any ideas why this would happen? I followed right along with your video
Interesting, sounds like either something is weird with your CSV data or maybe something like this: help.beebole.com/home/faq/csv-format-does-not-work-in-excel
@@LudoLodge thanks for your reply. I wonder if it has anything to do with me copying/pasting the text into the spreadsheet? I dunno. Frustrating! Great video.
Question: I am using an image object. I want to specify the parameter "flag" but not change the parameter "angle". "Angle" is a parameter that comes before "flag". Can I fill in that the angle should be the default value in some way? I did use 0 as that probably is the default value but I would prefer a more general solution to the problem.
great video, one question does the border, eat into your card size? im trying to make some poker size cards but when i cut them they are smaller. thanks
@@LudoLodge Thanks! I learned from the manual that I cannot have the "NAME" column in the spreadsheet contain any identical entries. I fixed it by just changing the column to "TITLE". So I guess nanDECK requires each field in a column with "Name" at the top to be unique.
Hi Ryan, and thanks so much for taking the time to make tutorials like these. I've run into a couple of problems in following this tutorial, and I wonder if you might have any idea how to fix them. First, when I build my deck, I'm getting 89 cards, even though I only have 34 rows in my csv sheet. Second, when I go to populate the text object using [NAME], nanDECK uses text from other columns as well. I have a feeling these problems are related, but I don't know enough about how nanDECK reads the .csv file to troubleshoot. Any ideas?
Hi Shane, I suspect it is an issue with the .CSV file itself... The first row of values should be the column headers, and each row under that should be one card. You can open the .CSV directly to see if there is anything weird, or feel free to link to it here and I can take a look.
One thing I notice is that you have some extra data in columns O through X for line 18. This is causing you to have a lot more columns defined (you can see a bunch of extra commas in the CSV), and maybe that confuses nanDECK since none of those extra columns have headers? I'd try taking those cells out and seeing what happens. 👍🏻
Hmmm... didn't really solve the problem. I'm getting fewer cards, but it keeps wanting to pull text from the Description (column F) instead of Name (column A).
I think it has to do with places where I've inserted new lines in the description text. I'll fiddle around with it and see. Thanks again for your time.
Is there a way to get around the “Label definition not supported between IF/ENDIF directives” is there a way to set in the spreadsheet a number then use that value as the element in a LABEL “table”
holà amigo très intéressante ta vidéo, j'apprend par ta vidéo, l'automatisme je le fait avec Inskape, mais il y a pas mal de chose que j'aimerais régler comme une macro. Comme des bandes qui se suive ou des image aussi qui se suive dans certain numéros de carte. J'avoues avoir compris le fond et l'idée mais pas encore de comprendre l'utilisation. Faut que je prenne du temp pour comprendre. Encore merci pour ta video qui est assez complexe pour mes neurone 😀
There is a key part missing to this whole tutorial. How did you get that NANdeck Tutorial.TXT up there, and where is the rest of the path? How exactly do you tell NANDECK where the CVS file is? Everything else seems pretty straightforward but you skipped the part where you actually "loaded?" the file onto Nandeck. The tut starts with that file there. Thanks for the help.
Thank you so much for such a high quality tutorial! I always thought about making my own card/board game, but the thought of having to manually draw every single card, even just to test it out made me reluctant. Now I have no excuses! haha
Hey, just found your channel, it is really helpful but I have a big problem. It says the image file is corrupted so I cannot add it do the deck. I am doing it as a class project so I need urgent help, do you know how to fix the issue? Btw I already tried changing the file format but it doesn't work edit: nvm, it took me long enough but after trying out all file formats, I managed to find some working for separate images, thank you so much for the tutorials!
Great tutorials mate!, watched the intro for Tabletop Simulator then jumped to this one and both are perfectly well explained, I recently started my journey into becoming a Game Designer and learning to use this tool will certainly help ;)!, I'm also a programmer so it's nice to know that board game designing also involves a bit of coding =D! If you have a Patreon link or somewhere I can support your work, please share the link =]!
Glad I could help! I've had a couple of comments about a Patreon... for now I just have been focusing on content but it is something I am considering in the future. Appreciate the support!
These videos are great, thanks! One question: For decks that are rather different (e.g. players' and villains' decks in Marvel United) would you suggest to use different nan-files and spreadsheets? Or can it be done with everything in one file and the proper use of ranges?
You are correct that ranges allow you to apply different attributes to different ranges of cards. You could also have a "card type" and use a conditional IF statement to contain the different groups. And if they are really different, it wouldn't hurt to just have separate spreadsheets and nandeck files; that is definitely the simplest approach.
"Maybe you're using some imaging software to make your cards one by one"
Me, sweating: N-no, you must have me confused with someone else...
Awesome video!
😂
Even that's over my head. I was literally cobbling them together using cropping in MS Paint.
Just wanted to say thank you. I have been working on a game for over a year and it has taken so long mostly because I had the wrong tools. With your videos I have gotten more accomplished this week than in the last several months combined.
So glad to hear it, it is definitely easy to get in the weeds of game design and forget to take time to think about how you might improve your process and approach!
I literally send this link to everyone making a card game that doesn't know the good news (NaNDeck). Great tool to prototype rapidly! Thanks for the video.
So glad you've found it to be a helpful resource! -Ryan
Thanks a lot for this tutorial dude... I was spending a lot of time drawing every card but now, in 1 hour I have a deck of around 80 cards ready to print.
Great work. You’ve given me everything thing I need to know to jump in and start making cards today! Very well done.
Thank you sooooo, so much!
Just started out with Board Game Design the last couple weeks and when I found your video about nanDeck and the tutroials you just saved me a TON of time experimenting and testing and even developing cards & tiles for my designs. Oh man. Can't thank you enough. Or the nanDeck devlopers even. As a board game designer you get so much using this software. Generating like 60 cards with different effects just using excel and Ludo Lodge's Tutorial Explanations. Thanks a lot.
Great tutorial, super straightforward and to the point. After slogging through the text tutorials that were available to learn Nandeck last year, I'd taken some time away from designing and sorta forgotten how to use it. You really helped me shake the dust off, thanks!
Finally, a video that shows me the basics of how to link a spreadsheet and how it pulls the data! Thank you!
Just watched this whole series before sitting down with nanDeck for the first time, and i can't thank you enough. super straightforward and easy to understand, awesome job! ^^
Thank you so much, I've avoided this program because I downloaded it years ago and just couldn't make heads or tails of anything. Decided to see if there were any worthwhile tutorials on it this time around and yours just made everything click (I'm not a programmer by any means). You're awesome.
This was literally perfect. I started today and wound up with a functional and clear prototype. I'd used a much jankier mail-merge-photoshop setup for my last prototype that had still removed most of the legwork, but we're talking the difference between days and a couple hours here. This tutorial gave me the *exact* amount of information I wanted (in conjunction with your other video on google spreadsheet integration and a comment there that confirmed how to reference multiple sheets in the same overarching spreadsheet).
S-tier job, mate!
Glad I could help!
Great video. It all looked so complicated at first but now I see how useful and easy it can be.
What a brilliant tool for prototyping. Thanks for the great tutorial. Reminds me of doing website designs 20+ years ago.
Great introduction - explained and demonstrated at just the right level for a beginner to nanDECK and it has got me started. Thank you
Thank you for this and your other nanDECK videos! I've been able to breathe new life into my game with the help of some easier prototyping methods (making everything by hand can be a bit taxing!). I really appreciate it!!
Thanks for the tutorials! You definitely helped me understand something better. I've tried twice to use Nandeck and gave up twice. Definitely going to try again now.
Great video and introduction to nandeck! before that I used powerpoint for prototyping cards. that is so much easier (after initial learning 🙂)
Thanks so much this is a blessing ^^. I was trying to figure out the program myself but I quickly remembered I'm not good with programming stuff anyway. Tried to find guides but a lot of them just didn't work for me, got confused or something. This is super clear.
Really great guide and very helpful, no fluff and great linking. Thank you for putting this together
This is a great video. I've just came up with my own card game today.
Hugely helpful - ha, just finished making my cards in excel and THEN RUclips decided to show me this video that's been out for months... 😜
For anyone who wants the first few lines for their nanDECK script, here they are:
LINKMULTI = Count
LINK = "nanDECK Tutorial.csv"
; Settings
UNIT = INCH
PAGE = 8.5, 11, PORTRAIT
BORDER = RECTANGLE, #000000, 0.1
MARGINS = 0.5, 0.5, 0.1, 0.1
You sir, are a life-saver. Hat off to you.
Nandeck is massive tool for game designers.
This is about as perfect a basic tutorial as you can ask for - - thanks!
Thank you so much for this tutorial. I was lost before, but this made everything super clear.
Great introduction and a great tool. Thanks very much! Got yourself a new subscriber :)
"I want it to be exactly the width of the card which is a little hard to do visually." Eh, you just need to toggle the snap-to-grid option in the bottom left corner. Still a good tutorial, thanks.
There is a way to link directly to the Google spreadsheet in the link command btw, but it is a little tricky.
Good to know, I will have to check that out!
This sounds very useful... Is there any explanation online on how to do it?
@@tristanheck2209 Caiuzx has a comment below about it, still haven't tried it myself!
What an awesome tutorial video~! Thank you!!!
Great video! Thank you! Just getting into prototyping for a board game that has been in R&D for quite some time. Super excited to use this for the iterative design process!
Was wondering if there is a way to round the corner on the Images. It seems that png files that are called to the cards must have sharp 90° corners.
Great tutorial!
Very complete and helpful, thanks you very much ^^
you can click wiz , and isn't difficult . You don't write code , simple click wiz and visual editor :D thanks for your video.
for export to tabletop simulator ad on last line DISPLAY=deck.png :D deck.png it's the name of file. :D
After hours of "Brainstorm" thx a bunch for your explanations Ludo & happy 2021 :)
Thank you for that!
Hey, this was a great tutorial! Just wondering, do you know if there's a way to display non-English text in nanDECK? By default it seems to just ignore it and only show English letters and numbers. Which is odd, because if I just input it into the text field it shows up.
Anyways. Great tutorial.
Fantastic. Thank you so much
Note for programmers: do not use single quotes (') to write the path to the file, it will not work! Use double quotes (") instead.
Thank you
@5:28 download virtual box, make VM, install Windows, use nanDECK.
Appreciate this vidoe. I'm wondering if NanDeck has any features that CardMaker doesn't have. I've been using CardMaker for years and NanDeck seems like a big step back, but maybe I'm missing something.
Hey
very good Tutorial, it helped me a lot!
But I have got 1 Problem:
At 20:09 when I doubleclick the Text file, I dont get a list like in the video. To use the example from the video, it looked like this for me: [COST;COUNT;DESCRIPTION;IMAGE;NAME]. So I could only click on this one insertoption.
Did anyone have similar problems and found a solution?
Did you figure out how to resolve this? I am running into this same thing right now.
HELLO, IT GETS ERRORS WHEN SAVEING, THE IMAGES AND TEXTS OVERLAP, I DON'T KNOW IF YOU CAN HELP ME... GREETINGS
i put a polygon inside a star and there's white garbage along the outline of the polygon (said polygon is set to empty)
Can you orient the visual editor to make a card in landscape?
Cool, thanks.
Are there any pitfalls to look out for if loading images? For example; they all need to have the same resolution and/or size if used in the same position.
Is there a way to change the coding page? If I use cyrillic letters they turn into some ugly mess on the cards.
Awesome tutorial, it really helped me to understand how things were set up and worked. I do have a question though that maybe you have the answer to. So I'm using nandeck to make some small tokens or like tiles. And on the bottom there are some icons. Well during gameplay those tiles get rotated and the new bottom will also have symbols. I am able to correctly orient the bottom, the right and the left. The top, however, is giving me troubles. I've tried to change the angle and tick the reverse box, but the closest I can get is to input the two keys for the icons in reverse order on my Google sheet.
For an example, say I have a left arrow and a down arrow on the top and the bottom. I use the key LD in Google sheets. On the tile I want the arrows to be upside down on the top when looking at it in the default orientation. Anytime I angle and reverse it either has the icons backwards or switches their order and I can't seem to get the orientation correct and in the same order without switching my key DL in Google sheets.
Interesting... it is hard to say without jumping in to nanDECK to mess around a bit, but my first instinct would have been to set the angle of the ICONS directive to 180? I'm guessing you are setting it to 90 and either -90 or 270 for the left and right sides. Let me know if you figured anything out on this, I can maybe give it a try sometime.
Great tutorial! I have a question, when I tried doing this for multiple images, some images were bigger than others but when I try to make them smaller, it also makes the already smaller images to the same size as the big image I made small, any help as to how to circumvent this?
I’ve run across a hurdle…
I have a number templates for each card type with a little colour on them. When I add text boxes for card name, etc, the box is white and blocks the template below it.
How can I make the text box transparent and keep the text itself opaque?
Never mind. I found it in another video.
There is a transparency check box under the Font tag.
Thanks for the video! When I try to use just the "name" field from my CSV on a text box, it imports EVERYTHING from my .csv. I had it set up just like your spreadsheet. Any ideas why this would happen? I followed right along with your video
Interesting, sounds like either something is weird with your CSV data or maybe something like this: help.beebole.com/home/faq/csv-format-does-not-work-in-excel
@@LudoLodge thanks for your reply. I wonder if it has anything to do with me copying/pasting the text into the spreadsheet? I dunno. Frustrating! Great video.
Question: I am using an image object. I want to specify the parameter "flag" but not change the parameter "angle". "Angle" is a parameter that comes before "flag". Can I fill in that the angle should be the default value in some way? I did use 0 as that probably is the default value but I would prefer a more general solution to the problem.
If I remember correctly, if you leave it blank without any value, nanDECK will use the default.
@@LudoLodge If i do two commas in a row without entering a value between I get the error message "invalid expression ".
great video, one question does the border, eat into your card size? im trying to make some poker size cards but when i cut them they are smaller. thanks
My guess is yes? I'd try setting the border to a really thick value and see which way it fills. 👍
What happens when you click "Validate " and there *is an error?I
"List index out of bounds (-1)" is the error prompt I'm getting.
That means there is some kind of error in your nanDECK "code," if you post your code here I can probably point out where that error is coming from!
@@LudoLodge Thanks! I learned from the manual that I cannot have the "NAME" column in the spreadsheet contain any identical entries. I fixed it by just changing the column to "TITLE". So I guess nanDECK requires each field in a column with "Name" at the top to be unique.
Hi Ryan, and thanks so much for taking the time to make tutorials like these. I've run into a couple of problems in following this tutorial, and I wonder if you might have any idea how to fix them. First, when I build my deck, I'm getting 89 cards, even though I only have 34 rows in my csv sheet. Second, when I go to populate the text object using [NAME], nanDECK uses text from other columns as well. I have a feeling these problems are related, but I don't know enough about how nanDECK reads the .csv file to troubleshoot. Any ideas?
Hi Shane, I suspect it is an issue with the .CSV file itself... The first row of values should be the column headers, and each row under that should be one card. You can open the .CSV directly to see if there is anything weird, or feel free to link to it here and I can take a look.
One thing I notice is that you have some extra data in columns O through X for line 18. This is causing you to have a lot more columns defined (you can see a bunch of extra commas in the CSV), and maybe that confuses nanDECK since none of those extra columns have headers? I'd try taking those cells out and seeing what happens. 👍🏻
@@LudoLodge Whoops, thank you!
Hmmm... didn't really solve the problem. I'm getting fewer cards, but it keeps wanting to pull text from the Description (column F) instead of Name (column A).
I think it has to do with places where I've inserted new lines in the description text. I'll fiddle around with it and see. Thanks again for your time.
Is there a way to get around the “Label definition not supported between IF/ENDIF directives” is there a way to set in the spreadsheet a number then use that value as the element in a LABEL “table”
Sorry, I'm not sure I understand your question!
Same catalina boat...i hear "wineTricks" works too...but screw it, ill just use PC or spend $25 on Multideck
Just saw this is 2 years old, but it still works! thank you for the video!
holà amigo
très intéressante ta vidéo, j'apprend par ta vidéo, l'automatisme je le fait avec Inskape, mais il y a pas mal de chose que j'aimerais régler comme une macro. Comme des bandes qui se suive ou des image aussi qui se suive dans certain numéros de carte. J'avoues avoir compris le fond et l'idée mais pas encore de comprendre l'utilisation. Faut que je prenne du temp pour comprendre.
Encore merci pour ta video qui est assez complexe pour mes neurone 😀
There is a key part missing to this whole tutorial. How did you get that NANdeck Tutorial.TXT up there, and where is the rest of the path? How exactly do you tell NANDECK where the CVS file is? Everything else seems pretty straightforward but you skipped the part where you actually "loaded?" the file onto Nandeck. The tut starts with that file there. Thanks for the help.
Thank you so much for such a high quality tutorial! I always thought about making my own card/board game, but the thought of having to manually draw every single card, even just to test it out made me reluctant. Now I have no excuses! haha
Hey, just found your channel, it is really helpful but I have a big problem. It says the image file is corrupted so I cannot add it do the deck. I am doing it as a class project so I need urgent help, do you know how to fix the issue?
Btw I already tried changing the file format but it doesn't work
edit: nvm, it took me long enough but after trying out all file formats, I managed to find some working for separate images, thank you so much for the tutorials!
Great tutorials mate!, watched the intro for Tabletop Simulator then jumped to this one and both are perfectly well explained, I recently started my journey into becoming a Game Designer and learning to use this tool will certainly help ;)!, I'm also a programmer so it's nice to know that board game designing also involves a bit of coding =D!
If you have a Patreon link or somewhere I can support your work, please share the link =]!
Glad I could help! I've had a couple of comments about a Patreon... for now I just have been focusing on content but it is something I am considering in the future. Appreciate the support!
These videos are great, thanks! One question: For decks that are rather different (e.g. players' and villains' decks in Marvel United) would you suggest to use different nan-files and spreadsheets? Or can it be done with everything in one file and the proper use of ranges?
You are correct that ranges allow you to apply different attributes to different ranges of cards. You could also have a "card type" and use a conditional IF statement to contain the different groups. And if they are really different, it wouldn't hurt to just have separate spreadsheets and nandeck files; that is definitely the simplest approach.
This was great, i had mastered the basics of the text/code editor. But the visual editor was absolute nonsense to me until your video. Thanks a bunch.
well done tutorial. I have some coding and inDesign background and it was still helpful to take my time and listen to your explanations.
My cards won't preview :/ any ideas why?
Did you validate and build the deck? And if so, were any errors printed to the console?
@@LudoLodge whoops, I validated it but didn't build it. 😅 I guess I missed that step in the video, haha. Thanks! Works now.