About

Summary

Game-icons.net is an online repository providing heaps of cool game related graphics.

They are provided provided under the terms of the Creative Commons 3.0 BY license.

It means that you can use them freely as long as you credit the original author in your creation(see below). A mention like "Icons made by {author;}. Available on https://game-icons.net" is fine.

You can also edit them online.

1. History
2. Philosophy
3. Recommendations
4. Roadmap
5. Authors
6. Contact

Sample

History

While developing a card game called Voltality on my spare time, I (Delapouite) decided to make the code my top priority at the expense of eye candies. The visual aspect of a game is obviously as important as the hidden part of the iceberg, but it has far less unknown aspects than writing a full realtime application for the first time.

So I started looking for nice graphical bits to populate my empty pages. I stumbled upon a wonderful resource on OpenGameArt.org, Lorc's 789 RPG icons pack. It was love at first sight.

All its content was both amazing and overwhelming. Two small issues in particular frustrated me a bit quite rapidly. First, because they were 400px bitmaps, those icons we're not easily customizable. Secondly, their huge number and the randomness of their organization made the whole package hard to browse.

The website you're reading at the moment is my attempt to resolve these problems and to contribute back to the open source community by adding my own vectors. Enjoy.

Philosophy

Each game story takes place in a unique atmosphere. Even if main trends exist like medieval or sci-fi backgrounds, it remains quite a challenge to gather the right assets to compose its interface.

Therefore the focus is made on individual icon, encouraging cherry picking rather than grabbing the entire collection (though it's still possible to do so).

Jumping from one illustration to the next should be intuitive and fun.

Quick color / size edition and export should be easy, by using the provided online tool, called Studio.

Recommendations

This set of guidelines may evolve over times, so don't forget to have a look at them if you intend to contribute to the project.

Icons

The goal is to create a homogeneous look and feel across the all library. Graphics have to remain simple but expressive at the same time.

As you may have noticed, the icons are quite inspired by the ones depicted in Team Fortress 2 or Dungeon Keeper 2 HUD. Their monochromatic nature can be easily inverted to suit your needs.

Have look at this Lorc's post where he explains the artistic direction he follows.

Tags

Building a good taxonomy is hard and can turn messy and inefficient very quickly. This fact becomes especially true as soon that more than one person is feeding it, leading to what is known as a hellish folksonomy.

So far, I tried to stick to these few principles :

• Create a new tag only if it's shared by at least 3 icons
• Tags are singular and single words
• A tag can be a verb (without the leading 'to') if the icon induces an action

You can also browse the collection by game genres

Descriptions

The main purpose of the descriptions is to provide colorful text with more synonyms in order to enhance the relevancy of search queries and complement the use of tags.

Instead of boring explanations of what the icon looks like ('Well, this is a duck'), I will try my best to write relevant informations about games in general ('This icon would fit perfectly to boost Donald's energy in the next Quackshot on Genesis').

Roadmap

The following items are in no specific order. There are no estimated deadlines.

• Get in contact with Lorc and possibly receive the original SVG document from him
• Build a basic skeleton for icon and tag pages
• Preview the SVG dynamically in common square sizes: 512, 256, 128, 64, 32, 16
• Embed an external search engine (Google)
• Build an archive generator (ZIP) tool to download lots of icons at once
• RSS feeds for recent modifications
• Batch render PNGs on the server side
• Add a showcase
• Split the global SVG file into individual files
• Find a unique name for each anonymous or ambiguous icon
• Render PNG images on demand in the browser in a canvas and export with data-url
• Release another set on top of Lorc's one
• Build a customization webtool to live-tweak size, rotation, color, shadow...
• Tag icon
• Replace the place holder description for all of them
• Open source the project on GitHub to allow a smooth contribution process
• Host files on a proper CDN

Authors & Contributors

Contact

An idea, suggestion or a naughty bug? Post a message on theGitHub tracker or ping me on delapouite@gmail.com

More questions?

Have a look at the F.A.Q.

Credits

Background pattern of the website made by VectorPile