Getting started on my first game. Have a few questions, if you are willing to help.
Hey guys! Long time lurker, first time builder. Call me Zed.
Anyway. I have some questions that I was hoping some of you might be able to help with and, at the same time, thought it might be kinda fun to do a little blog post type thing about what I've been working on here, since I hope that you guys would enjoy it. If you want, you can skip this for the questions, and I'll TL;DR them at the end.
To start, I want to tell you a bit about myself.
Gaming, and more specifically, board games, are in my blood. One of my first memories ever is playing Star Wars Monopoly with my family. A few years later, another core memory of mine was staying up all night during Y2K and making up board games with my dad. I started playing Yu-Gi-Oh! and Magic and just absolutely anything I could get my hands on. I've always loved games. And I've always wanted to publish a game.
Unfortunately I have pretty bad bouts of ADHD, so I'd get about halfway through a design and lose interest. Come up with something fun and then give up again.
Now I'm 32 and I still have that dream and about a thousand ideas floating around. So last week I sat down and I sketched out some *super* basic rules. Rules that barely even qualify as rules, imo.
But they were rules and they were mine.
It was just a dumb little card game idea. Like if Tamagotchi slammed itself into Munchkin, really. But it gave me a starting point.
Now we roll around to yesterday and I sit down to design the cards I needed. But something happened. I didn't stop. I designed 108 (very basic) cards for my game. More than I've ever done in my life for any of my games, and I did it in 24 hours.
So now I'm getting feedback, maybe getting ready to playtest, and wondering what you guys think my next steps might be!
TL;DR Questions below!
So this is my main question right now. I'm not a graphic arts designer and have no idea how to get a frame that looks good. This example frame is from a pack I downloaded for MSE2 (credit to Piet) and the image was generated on ChatGPT (before you crucify me, I hate the pic too, it's just an example image). I really don't need a lot of info on the card, just "Fight/Smarts/Charm" for stats, an ability line, and then a name and type line. Other cards will need one score (strength) instead of 3, a rewards section (this can probably be done with icons, mostly), and... I think that's it. Everything else can fit in the same area.
Where do you guys go to get your frames for this kind of thing?
Where could I go for good images for 108 unique cards on a budget?
What is a good next step (after playtesting)?
Should I be sharing more info about the game with you guys so you can get an idea for how it plays? Or hold that a little closer to the chest for now?
Posted Aug 16, 2025, 8:36 PM UTC