I've been replaying FF8 the last couple of days and I'm loving it like always, but last night while destroying some kid in Triple Triad I thought about how great it would be to have my own set of Triple Triad cards of the main cast of the game. I looked online and Square Enix have done a few different types of TT cards over the years, most featuring characters from the whole series with some others using the same layout as the ones from 8 itself, though they were only released in Japan. It didn't seem like I was gonna be able to collect any (at least not for cheap). Then I had a great idea;
I'll make them!
So here we are, my (somewhat) ingenious choice to be creative and try to make my own set of Triple Triad cards. My goal is to make eight of them featuring the main party, Seifer and Laguna but I might make some for Edea, Kiros and Ward depending on how well this goes. I'm gonna post updates as I work on perfecting the card itself then as I eventually move on to making each card. Hopefully people can come into the thread and post impressions or tips as I make my way through the cast and hell, maybe I can convince some people to try this too!
I started working on Squall's card first and managed to find a spare pack of playing cards in my house as the base. Unfortunately, most of the assets for Triple Triad are pretty low quality so I had make the card itself through Photoshop, using the original cards as a base.
The Squall art I first used was way too big and made it look super blurry when I sized it down to the measurements of the playing card I'm using as the base (about 5.7cm wide and 8.7cm long). However I was fortunate enough to find a small enough image online that looked good when I fit into the dimensions of the Photoshop canvas size. From there I had to try and make it look as close to the card as possible, so I pulled an image from FF8 Remastered and used that as my reference point.
Soon after that, however, I ended up running into the problem of having to use the border and numbers from the original cards. At first I just found a Photoshop font that felt close to the original, but after trying to find the border I stumbled upon the amazing Qhimm modding forums which had a great thread that featured a lot of high quality Triple Triad assets such as a fancier looking border and numbers. Big shout-out to that thread because I would have been honestly stumped otherwise.
I ran into a couple problems once I put everything together, though, mainly the fact that the width of the image was too big for the card, though the height was perfect. Once adjusting the width, it became impossible to have the full border fit onto the new canvas size, so I had to cut the border in half then place one of them so that it would fit with the other half. While this worked, the colours didn't exactly match up so I had to quickly use the brush tool to make it look neater (I think I did a good job on that myself lol). Once that was done, it was time to print!
The printing and glueing process went fine, though the glue I used was absolutely shite so I'm definitely going to have get some better glue because the one I used last night was just old and awful lol. Unfortunately due to either the glue or the paper I used (probably both), parts of the card turned out a bit blotchy and damp plus one of the corners peeled off a bit, so I'm going to use some stronger card paper next time. Once that was all done and I realised it was now nearly midnight and I'd spent almost two hours on this random idea I had, I was done! Presenting the final product;
Not bad for a first attempt if I do say so myself! Obviously there's a lot of issues here I'm going to have to iron out to make it look a lot neater, but I'm happy with it for being a first attempt at this. I'm gonna hold off on doing other cards for now until I can make the Squall card look better which will be my next update. For now my changes for next time are gonna be a different type of paper (preferably card), better glue and better trimming on the edges (I totally forgot the cards I was using were curved on the edges so I'll have to work around that next time too).
So yeah, that's phase 1 of my plan! Hopefully I can get round to working on the rest of the character cards and end up framing them. I'll be posting updates as I finish each phase so you'll see this thread bumped every now and then. Let me know what you guys think! If you have any tips I'd greatly appreciate them too, it's been a long time since I did this kind of DIY arts and crafts stuff so I could use some pointers lol. Thanks for reading and see you at the next update!
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