Game Glossaries: Icon Set Design
Overview
Create 100 icons variations that fit a central theme for a Gameboy-style icon set, such foods, hero portraits, spells, enemies, or robots.
Background
This assignment was design using TILT as a module for Art 102 Design 1 at Lake Washington Institute of Technology. This is one of the earliest art classes students take for Lake Washington Institute of Technology's Game, Design, Illustration, and Gen Ed programs.
Links
Task
Create 151 (or 100) variations that fit a central theme for a Gameboy-style icon set, such foods, hero portraits
Purpose
An abundance of content is a central reward in many games and toys. Whether it’s food, weapons, trophies, or cute battling animals, it’s amazing how many hours users will invest just to unlock that final 240x160 sprite. And how many millions have been spent on collectible card games, just because people need a rare card, literally just piece of paper?
This assignment will teach you to iterate over many options while keeping them united under a single brand, art style, and quality. It will also teach you to manage the scope of a project; creating 151 options (152 if you count the missing number) means that if you get bogged down in the first 10 or mismanage your time, you’ll fall short. A Dex will also require developing a pipeline to minimize waste and maximize flexibility and modularity, such as layering outfit changes, reusing color palettes, and evolving icons over several stages.
Criteria for Success
Style: Icon sets should have a consistent style across all options. If two of your icons were chosen at random, a viewer should reasonably be able to guess if they’re related. Try and display them beautifully, utilizing gutters, labeling, titles, and that poster vibe you loved as a kid. Think of the pictorial glossaries in game guides. Think of the cardboard back of an action figure or figurine
Subject: Icon sets should belong to a single subject. 151 Battle Monsters, 151 special items, 151 baby robots, 151 enemy types, 151 character avatar portraits, 151 outfit changes, 151 crafting recipes, 151 space ships, 151 special ability buttons, 151 unlockable achievements. Although the term sprite sheet comes close to encapsulating this, these icon sets should NOT be animations, but they CAN be major poses, such as doing 4 levels of damage on spaceships, or 4 emotions on character portraits. Our goal is to brainstorm the full spectrum of a thematic option, not motion.
Scope: Don’t go overboard on any one item. If you spend 5 minutes on each item, that’s 12.5 hours. Limit the physical size of your options to prevent feature creep. Avoid heavy detailing, and limit your rendering of form; at most, only line art, flat colors, shadows, and highlights. The first pancake always comes out wrong!!! If your first two or three icons don’t inspire you, power through, and you’ll discover ways to simplify and standardize your process. Although 151 icons is the proper homage, 100 is the minimum.
Specifications: Digital assignments should be 240x160 maximum per option. Analog assignments should make options a maximum of post-it note size. Limit your modular re-use to 4 or so. For example, if you were making spell icons and re-coloring an icon for different energies (ice/fire/electric/poison), only do so 4 times.
Rubric
100 points total:
1 per icon!
Icons that are wrong in style or re-use too heavily can receive a reduction in points.
Knowledge
The Spriters Resource has many sprite sheets from gaming history, like this one. Good examples from games can often be found in glossaries, where every hero, spell, or bad guy in a game has their pictures right next to each other. At level 1, players are enticed into commitment with visions of a grayed out skill tree, promising astonishing power in your future. Toys often budget as much as 60% of their packaging to visions of the complete collection, advertising the importance of collecting the whole set.
Search for the following on the internet to find many such icon sets:
Game icon set
RPG icon set
Sprite Sheet
Spell icons
Bestiary
Specific games you loved
Of course, there’s also the boring version of this ideal:
App icons
User interface buttons
School posters about the alphabet or whatever
Skills
If working analog, research styles that replicate quickly while maintaining visual beauty, such as pen and ink, markers, and watercolor flood fills.
If working digitally, research icon design strategies for your software of choice, such as Illustrator, Photoshop, Blender, or Krita. Additionally, consider learning one of many software packages that were designed for a sprite-based workflow.