I’ve been interested in building Undine Studios’ Project Dreamscape for a while. It’s now OOP and there are a few used copies still available Stateside but I felt this would be a good candidate for PNP. I picked up the files from PNP Arcade.
The Build
The PNP files for Project Dreamscape are unusual. They spaced out 6 cards per page and there is double-whitespace (whitespace around each card PLUS gutters). The resulting file is 38 pages, which ends up being 18 sheets of cards printed front/back. That’s a lot of laminating, printing, and cutting for a small card game.
Now that I have Nandeck-foo I knew that if I could find a way to easily extract the individual cards I could lay them out however I wanted, including a 9-card layout which would only require 6 double-sided pages for the 52-card base deck. I decided to open the .pdf in GIMP, crop the layered image to 1 card space, then export the layers as .pngs for all 6 card spaces. The only issue I encountered was the plugin would overwrite each set of cards. The plugin doesn’t provide an obvious way to change the exported image filenames without renaming the source file or the layers, so the easiest solution was to change the pdf filename each time.
'Size definitions
UNIT=MM
PAGE=210,297,PORTRAIT,HV
CARDSIZE=63,88
'Cutting Guides and removing borders
BORDER=RECTANGLE,#000000,0.1,MARKDOT,#0000FF
FONT=Arial,128,,#000000
TEXT=1-{(images)+(cardback)},{§},0,0,100%,100%
EDGE=1,NULL
DUPLEX = 1-{(images)},{(images)+(cardback)}
PRINT=DUPLEX
'Create a list of images files from a folder
[images]=DIRFILES("C:\Users\neonaut\Pictures\pnp\templates\modifiedprojectdreamscape\base",*.png)
[cardback]="C:\Users\neonaut\Pictures\pnp\templates\modifiedprojectdreamscape\card-back.png"
'Put an image on each card
IMAGE=1-{(images)},[images],0,0,100%,100%,0,P
'Add image backs as duplex
IMAGE={(images)+(cardback)}, [cardback],0,0,100%,100%,0,P
The booklet I got from PNP Arcade was also formatted oddly, four pages to a single PDF sheet. Fortunately I found a proper 1-page formatted rulebook on the website. I have no idea why they included the weird pdf in the commercial PNP files. The game also uses 5 tokens, numbered. These are static value markers so you could create a playmat or go without. I made simple laminated counters with rounded corners.
Grousing about the files aside, the artwork is really cute.