Photoshop Variables: Game Production Art

Learn how to use variables in Photoshop to generate artwork for game designs.

Games often require many variations of a single asset, such as cards, tokens, or badges. Using Photoshop variables, designers can speed up and simplify the process of creating these repetitive elements. They can create a single template for their artwork, load all the text and graphics from an external data file, and generate 100s or 1000s of assets at one time. This workflow also allows for adjustments to the design, text, and imagery very late into the process—without impacting the production schedule.

In this course, Dennis Meyer shows how to create and manage the artwork for an example card game using Photoshop variables. He'll show how to organize a basic template in Photoshop, assign variables for the text and images, and build an external data source in a Google spreadsheet (taking advantage of calculations and other powerful spreadsheet functions). Then he'll show how to load data into the template, export artwork, and make the template available to others.

Introduction

• Welcome
• What you should know
• Using the exercise files

1. Working with Photoshop Variables

• Why use Photoshop variables?
• Understanding the card template
• Creating text replacement variables
• Creating pixel replacement variables
• Creating visibility variables

2. Working with Your Data Source

• Setting up a data source file
• Referencing images in a data source file
• Creating a management spreadsheet
• Reviewing Photoshop variable errors
• Challenge: Building a master from a data file
• Solution: Building a master from a data file

3. Revising Your Template

• Preflighting your data
• Exporting your data sets
• Working with your output files

Conclusion

• Next steps