Where there’s a will, there’s a way

For the most part, online trading card games follow a weekly update schedule. Updates are blog-like posts which include a list of members who have leveled up or mastered decks—collecting more than a specified number of cards and collecting all the cards in a deck, respectively—note which games can be played again—how members earn cards—and most importantly, present new decks to be collected.

As such, online trading card games require a bit of maintenance and upkeep past their initial launch. To tackle this, the community turned to PHP and MySQL to relieve the tedious task of keeping track of member information and card decks. I learned the majority of what I know about PHP and databases through this process.

Make it bright, make it colourful, make it shiny

Maintenance aside, the draw of online trading card games are the decks themselves. I went into snow wanting to offer decks that were colourful beyond measure. This meant playing around with the source image’s saturation and getting intimately acquainted with colour correction and balance in Photoshop.