Prototyping Transparent Game Cards
Have a game concept that relies on transparent printing but aren’t sure how to pull it off? It is possible… here’s how I did it.
Transparent cards are the heartbeat of the XYbrid play experience. Giving players the ability to overlay parts to build monsters in a visual way is what makes the game distinct and memorable. For most of its life, XYbrid was playtested with paper cards—good for testing mechanics, but ultimately inadequate for making the best impression during demos. As XYbrid evolved, the value of having transparent cards became quite apparent: it would not only prove the concept, but also provide real, tangible objects to showcase on the Kickstarter campaign page .
Game manufacturers who could handle transparent plastic printing required a minimum order of at least 500 units; some as many as 1,500. They are sure to do a great job on a true production run, but ordering that quantity pre-funding is out of the question (and counter to the Kickstarter model).
There are short-run game printers who handle any manner of printed paper products (including cards, boards, rulebooks, etc), but clear plastic cards, I came to discover, are not so easy to source. None of the short-run printers I found offered that service.
What I needed was a prototype.
A prototype, as I defined it for XYbrid, has two attributes:
As close to the envisioned final product as possible.
Durable enough to withstand shuffling and contact with hands and tables
Perfectly clear plastic, with the thickness of a typical game card
Two-sided printing with near-perfect alignment front-to-back
Normal color printing plus a layer of opaque white ink, to provide a base for the colors
I only needed 15 sets—enough for playtesting, demos, and sending to reviewers.
After finding game production specialists to be a dead end, I started reaching out to my print contacts in the graphic design industry. While most were eager to help, they were unable to solve the problem. Most conversations led to the suggestion that I repurpose a custom gift card product, which is too thick, the wrong size, and the wrong material.
I finally had success with Hopkins Printing in Columbus. They took time to understand my goal and went beyond their normal process to figure out how to do it.
The project would be printed on a digital press. Digital presses are built for short runs—think of them as ultra-high capability desktop printers. Hopkins operates a digital press that can print on 15 mil (that’s roughly playing card thickness) clear vinyl, including white ink. Aligning the art on both sides was a struggle. When a human being flips over a sheet to print on the other side, some degree of misalignment is inevitable. If the alignment was off by even a small amount, the art was ruined.
The team at Hopkins came to an ingenious solution: to print all the inks on one side of the plastic, so no flipping was necessary. They would first print a layer of color ink as a mirror image, then the white, then the other layer of color ink, without ever having to move the plastic sheet. Because the material was clear, you would see the mirror image through the back side of the card, effectively un-mirroring the art.
The end result looked and worked great.
Getting Technical: Preparing Art Files
My art files were created in Adobe Illustrator (I highly recommend Illustrator or InDesign over Photoshop for final art for many reasons). Fortunately, all of XYbrid’s art was vector-based (i.e. created in Illustrator) so managing the art all took place in one application. If your art is pixel-based, as many illustrations are, you’ll need to manage your inks/colors in Photoshop and import the images to Illustrator (or InDesign). That’s a bit trickier but the principles described below are the same.
The basic idea is that you are creating two layers for each piece of art: a normal color layer, and a white underlay.
Each card has its own file, and each file contains art for the front and back, on two separate artboards. The art on each artboard is a mirror silhouette of the other—it’s exactly the same shape, and in exactly the same position.
I used layers to stay organized in Illustrator. This method is a lifesaver if you ever need to go back and edit your art (you will).
Safe Area There is no actual art on this layer, just guidelines. These lines mark a .125” safe zone around the edge of the card—I kept all my art within this designated area. This zone assures that any minor shifts during cutting will not cut into any important printing. If your card art “bleeds” (i.e. goes off the edge of the card), you can go into the safe area; just keep important stuff (such as text) out of there.
Dieline This layer holds the outline of the card so the printer will know where to cut. It’s a rounded rectangle with .125” radius on the corners. This layer should also be non-printing.
White All of my elements that are printed with white ink are on this layer. Remember, this is the foundation for all the art you want to be opaque.
IMPORTANT! DO NOT USE THE STANDARD WHITE INK SWATCH. Remember, objects that appear “white” on screen are actually just the color of the surface you are printing on, which in this case is transparent! Instead, create a new, brightly-colored “spot color” swatch and manually rename it “White”. It will look wrong on your screen, but this setup will help the printer understand your intent.
If it seems counterintuitive to have this layer above the colored ink layer, that’s because it is… my printer requested the files be set up this way, with the white objects set to “Overprint Fill” in the Attributes palette. Your printer may request a different layer setup.
Setting “Overprint Fill” lets the printer know the selected object is to be printed even if it appears concealed by another object on screen. This is important because the white and colored ink layers overlap.
CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) This layer contains all the art that uses colored ink. Remember that colored ink is translucent, so anything you don’t want to be see-through should have white overlapping it.
Accurate alignment of colored printing with white underprinting is super important. However, even with awesomely precise machines, tiny shifts can cause misregistration. If your white layer is exactly the same size and shape as your CMYK layer, these tiny shifts can cause a sliver of white to appear at the edges of your art. If this happens, it looks bad.
You can eliminate this risk by putting “trapping” on the CMYK layer. Trapping is just an extra amount of buffer around the edges of the art to cover up any slightly imperfect alignment. For XYbrid art, I added a 1 pt stroke outline (usually 100% black) to all the CMYK art.
Having a good, communicative relationship with your printer is critical. This is an unusual job and you must be confident they understand what you want.
Printing this type of prototype is not cheap—estimate it to cost 15 to 20 times the cost per unit of mass-producing a card game (Each 116-card XYbrid deck was about $100). The benefit is that you can order as few as you need, so it’s easier to factor that expense into your budget. For me, proving the concept and having high-quality, photogenic samples was definitely worth it.
In the process we used at Hopkins, the white ink is noticeably thick. It has a texture you can feel. This type of ink is generally NOT used in mass-produced transparent cards (the final printing for XYbrid used a much thinner white), so there will be a discrepancy between your prototype and final product in this way.
You can try advanced techniques on the white layer, such as gradients, if you want to achieve a fade from white to clear in some areas. For me, this experimentation had mixed results; the thickness of the white ink seemed to hamper the gradient effect.
Be prepared to adjust your files and techniques when your game goes into final manufacturing. Each printer has different standards for art files and inks. The thinner white ink mentioned above required six coats of printing to achieve acceptable opacity in the final product.
Comment or message me if you have any questions.
Here’s the contact info for my rep at Hopkins:
Jonell Murphy
Hopkins Printing
(800) 319-3352
Hopkinsprinting.com
Get your copy of XYbrid at shop.xybridgame.com.
