Hi everyone, two weeks ago I introduced GUListCreator here as a tool to show Gods Unchained cards more easily, especially for deck builders and content creators on Hive. The initial version was very scuffed, yet I could see a number of community members using it for their posts. This motivated me to continue development on it and today I'm excited to share with you the v1.0.0 release, which should be enough for most people's use cases.
Quick Tour of Features
Let's say I want to showcase a cool combo: the Expectant Chicken with Out of Its Misery. First, I go to the GUListCreator tool's website (https://gu-list-creator.vercel.app/) and am greeted by the rather plain-looking home page.
To search for a card, I can either click on the "Card Search" input box or press Ctrl + K to focus on the search bar. Being fond of keyboard shortcuts, I press Ctrl + K to focus on the search bar and start searching for "Expectant Chicken".
Oops, I made a typo! But it's okay, because the fuzzy search algorithm helped to approximately match the search term to potential results. I click on the "Expectant Chicken" and it shows up on the white canvas.
I decide that I also want to showcase the Chicken Egg and Brash Chicken, which are non-collectible cards and are only seen when the Expectant Chicken is played. In the same way I searched for "Expectant Chicken", I repeated the steps for the Chicken Egg and Brash Chicken. Lastly, I add in Out of Its Misery to complete the combo showcase.
The overall canvas seems a little too big! Let me first try to shrink the card sizes. I open the "Options" menu to unveil a set of toggles and inputs.
By changing the image width to 250px, I managed to get them to all fit on the same row. Neat!
Hmm, the cards look too normal; I want my cards to have more bling. Let's make all of the cards Diamond by changing the "Card Quality" dropdown value.
Nice, but now I decide that I want only Out of Its Misery to be of the Shadow quality. At the same time, I also want to make it slightly smaller. To do so, I click on the "Options" button below the Out of Its Misery card to unveil a secondary options modal.
By changing the image width to 200px and its card quality to Shadow, my canvas now looks like this, which is exactly what I wanted.
Great, time to export the image - I click on the "Save as PNG" button in the toolbar, and it automatically downloads an image.png to my computer that looks like this:
It does seem a little plain, so I go onto Canva to add a little decoration.
Perfect! Going back to the GUListCreator tab, I decide that I want to save this set of cards for the future. I click on the "Save Canvas As" button and give it the name "Ultimate Chicken Combo".
Now, even if I clear the canvas, I can reload what I've just made by clicking on the "Load Canvas" button and clicking on the "Ultimate Chicken Combo" save.
And my canvas is restored!
Features
I hope the quick tour of features was sufficient to showcase all the new features that I've developed, but if not, here's a list of the features that I have included with the v1.0.0 release of GUListCreator:
- Quick and fuzzy search for currently available cards in GU
- Adjustable image sizes
- Adjustable card quality
- Adjustable alignment of cards in both axes
- Dark Mode (Thank @entrepidus for suggesting this; I wouldn't have included Dark Mode otherwise 😂)
- Export to PNG with transparent background (arguably the most important feature since you might want to do further editing to the card images)
I may or may not add more new features moving forward, but I believe that the current feature set should be sufficient for most use cases, which is the reason I decided to give it a v1.0.0 release. Of course, do let me know if you encounter any bugs; I'd be happy to fix them if they can be fixed.
Concluding Thoughts
I started this tool initially without any plan of continuing development but knowing that some of you guys do use it has motivated me to do a little more. I may continue to make minor updates periodically to GUListCreator and although I probably won't make posts about them, you can always read what changed in the changelog. Although there may be some issues here and there, I hope this tool serves everyone in the community here well! Cheers! 😄
P.S. For the more technically inclined, if you're interested in how I developed this, do read my dev blog that I posted some time back: Dev Blog: Creating the Gods Unchained List Creator