I’ve been pounding away at Age of Heroes this whole week. I’ve poured through the recommendations of my playtesters, and I think the next test set will be much stronger. I also discovered a few things that I could do to simplify the card layout.
I recently watched my old review of Icewind Dale, and I noticed something fascinating: all of the magic items had small, simple pictures, and all of the spells had colored icons. Diablo did something very similar.
The thing that I liked about this system was that it was very easy to tell which spell was wish by looking at the icon and its color. I got to thinking about Age of Heroes, and how this simple artistic device would make the card design a lot easier. In addition, I think it will make the cards stand out more.
In order to get the positioning and fonts right, I had to learn some of the coding for Magic Set Editor. The funny thing is that I have no idea what language I was programming in, but given that I had examples (from other game and style files) I was able to figure out what it wanted me to do.
I think this is going to work out well.