Card Hog: Workshop Guide

At the moment of writing this, all the tools available are in a very early stages and are not connected to Steam Workshop. I’m looking forward to any feedback, so I could make card and character creation smooth and accessible experience to anyone who is interested in making their content for Card Hog.

Feel free to try out and break things. There’s fun in that too!

At the moment Card Editor is both basic and super-confusing as it was created mainly to adjust and align existing card designs, but I later decided to publish it publicly for everyone to experiment with.

To create a new card, you’ll need a simple ID which doesn’t match any of the existing cards (just add some numbers!) and a 128×128 PNG image. You can also upload 256×128 sprite sheet with two images for these card types:

• Character or enemy, where second frame should be “armless” to look better when it holds a weapon
• Weapons, where second frame is white paw or hand which will be overlaid over the first frame

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In the future you’ll be able to set the values of the card and its type from the UI, but currently all what is available is choosing an existing card to be used as a template (PARENT). I would advice only picking basic items and enemies for this as a lot of card behavior is tied to their identifiers and using them with your custom creation can have some unexpected results. Might be funny, though!

• Select image is where you can swap the sprite with another image from your PC
• Clicking white rectangle at the left of the preview will allow entering HTML code of the card color, which will be used in certain elements (like the hand holding weapon)

Select menu below the card preview lets you switch between elements you can modify. Mainly cosmetics like icon or shadow position, angle and scale.

• Drag the icon around to change its position
• Mouse SCROLL to change the scale
• SHIFT+SCROLL controls angle
• CTRL+SCROLL adjusts alpha

For weapons it’s very important to set the handle position in the “HELD” section (drag the little node around). You can press “Q” to play the attack animation and see how that works. More weapon positioning options are coming in the future.

The cards you create here can only be used in custom character loadout or in custom deck.

Currently there’s one custom character slot and currently you have to edit it half in the character selection menu and half in workshop, so UI clearly needs a lot of work here.

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• Inspect cards using RMB or SHIFT to unlock the custom character slot
• Click on the character
• Choose a sprite override from the existing creature cards (it’s only cosmetic) or upload your own
• Adjust colors and positioning in the Card Editor
• Click on character card slots to replace them with any unlocked and discovered card from the game or your own custom creations

There’s an option to create a custom deck from the unlocked and created cards to play around and experiment a bit. It’s pretty straightforward, just browse card list and click left mouse button to add them to your deck or right mouse button to remove.

No progression or placement is available in this mode at the moment, but more advanced playground will be added in the future.

There’s also a semi-public way to create custom themes, but you’ll have to edit JSON files manually, until I’ll add UI for that too.

Here’s one example theme: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c7h9ub24v7yl2o8/classy.zip

You can find others in game directory.

Put them in game’s themes folder %localappdata% folder (C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\CardHog\themes\) and if you haven’t messed up the syntax, it should appear in theme selection at game settings.