Looking for a program to help Game Design

[Airea]

I am posting this because I have a gut feeling that I've been trying to recreate the wheel, and that isn't a rational thing to do.

I'm designing a trivia-based card game that will pull from an excel file. I need a program that can pull and plug that information and generate cards. Better if it also creates the cards digitally to help online play also.

I don't mind paying for a program that does this, it's rather key. Thanks in advance for suggestions.

[El'the Ellie]

What visual are you looking for for the result? Are you looking for some kind of nice graphical display of the card, or is a line of text appearing of the 'card 'on a command prompt sufficient?

[Airea]

A simple white card, with nine smaller boxes and a central area for text. No colors or images. The game information is complex enough that I'm going with as simple an interface as I can. I need each box to correspond to a box in the excel.

[El'the Ellie]

I don't know of anything specifically that provides what you're thinking, but if you're willing to learn a small bit of programming I know something that will definitely do the job, and support other things besides.

Unity (https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download) is a free game making program that can be used to create a game pretty much however you decide to make it, and making a deck drawing flash cards is not incredibly complicated.

I'm not sure exactly what format your data in the excel sheet needs to be in, but chances are it can be written as a CSV (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3507498/reading-csv-files-using-c-sharp) file, or text file if you don't want to learn file types and don't mind writing a simple text parser, and then stored into your game's memory, and then put onto cards when they are drawn. If it specifically needs to be an excel sheet, there is a library (https://coderwall.com/p/app3ya/read-excel-file-in-c) to grab data from an excel sheet into a program.

This way starts to get decently into the weeds of programming, but it sounds like the best way to this custom 'flash card' type visual. (And programming really isn't that bad! There's lots of good free tutorials (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlKaB1etrik)!)

[Excession]

I am posting this because I have a gut feeling that I've been trying to recreate the wheel, and that isn't a rational thing to do.

I'm designing a trivia-based card game that will pull from an excel file. I need a program that can pull and plug that information and generate cards. Better if it also creates the cards digitally to help online play also.

I don't mind paying for a program that does this, it's rather key. Thanks in advance for suggestions.


A simple white card, with nine smaller boxes and a central area for text. No colors or images. The game information is complex enough that I'm going with as simple an interface as I can. I need each box to correspond to a box in the excel.

Where do you need to display these cards? In a web browser, Windows computer, Mac, phone/tablet, TV, or something else?

What interactions do the cards have? Do you click/tap on parts to to answer the questions? If so, what happens when you are right or wrong? Do you just need to display a random card for a fixed period of time before showing the answer?

There are a lot of online flash card tools that a Google search will find. They may not have Excel import, but there might be some file format you can upload for them.

To start giving answers, I will assume that what you need is something that can read an Excel file, pull data from the right cells in it, and output a document of some sort for each "card" that can be easily displayed in some way. If I was to do that myself, I would write it in Python (https://www.python.org/). The openpyxl (https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/) library can read Excel .xlsx files easily, and the easiest type of document to generate would be HTML, though that would require learning HTML as well. Those documents could then be displayed in a web browser. Alternatively, you could create bitmap images (or SVG or PDF) using Cairo via the PyCairo (https://cairographics.org/pycairo/) library. That would give you something that a photo gallery slideshow program could display, but which could still be displayed in a web browser.

If you wanted to learn programming, this is the sort of small, focused, task that makes for a good starter project.

[Algeh]

Depending on if I'm understanding you correctly, you may be able to just pull your data into Word using a mail merge. Mail merges are for things like sending letters to everyone on a list with the correct name and address pre-printed on them, and you basically just set up an excel spreadsheet with each row an entry in the merge and each column the different things about that entry you want displayed in various places.

Example:
Name, address, phone
John Smith, 123 example st., 555-5555
Ex Ample, 987 dubious way, 555-0055

You then set up your document with merge fields for things like name and phone and have it pull the data from the spreadsheet so one letter is sent to John and another is sent to Ex.

[Airea]

I don't know of anything specifically that provides what you're thinking, but if you're willing to learn a small bit of programming I know something that will definitely do the job, and support other things besides.

Unity (https://unity3d.com/get-unity/download) is a free game making program that can be used to create a game pretty much however you decide to make it, and making a deck drawing flash cards is not incredibly complicated.

I'm not sure exactly what format your data in the excel sheet needs to be in, but chances are it can be written as a CSV (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3507498/reading-csv-files-using-c-sharp) file, or text file if you don't want to learn file types and don't mind writing a simple text parser, and then stored into your game's memory, and then put onto cards when they are drawn. If it specifically needs to be an excel sheet, there is a library (https://coderwall.com/p/app3ya/read-excel-file-in-c) to grab data from an excel sheet into a program.

This way starts to get decently into the weeds of programming, but it sounds like the best way to this custom 'flash card' type visual. (And programming really isn't that bad! There's lots of good free tutorials (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlKaB1etrik)!)

Thanks for the lead.

I'm actually learning programming, I'm just very much a beginner right now.

[loasmkers]

Depending on if I'm understanding you correctly, you may be able to just pull your data into Word using a mail merge. Mail merges are for things like sending letters to everyone on a list with the correct name and address pre-printed on them, and you basically just set up an excel spreadsheet with each row an entry in the merge and each column the different things about that entry you want displayed in various places.

Example:
Name, address, phone
John Smith, 123 example st., 555-5555
Ex Ample, 987 dubious way, 555-0055

You then set up your document with merge fields for things like name and phone and have it pull the data from the spreadsheet so one letter is sent to John and another is sent to Ex.

Good idea :smile: