This triggered a memory from my early days of learning to code...
When I was in middle school and high school – late '90s and early '00s – I got heavily into forums and message boards. Customizing them was a major part of how I taught myself to code, and me and some friends spent a lot of time building RPG features into them. Shops, battle systems, and lots of other RPG and community features. Every action required a full page reload, as XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?)
There were no CC-licensed game asset collections, but there was a site, rpg-icons.com, that had a assets from many games, mostly RPGs. Breath of Fire, Harvest Moon, Final Fantasy, and so many more. I would spend hours looking through that site, searching for the perfect sprite to use for this or that item. It was a lot of fun to use assets from our favorite games to do our own creative thing. Maybe not super legal, per se, but still super fun.
I haven't done game stuff in almost 20 years, but almost my entire career has been web stuff. I'm glad resources like this – CC-licensed game assets – exist for today's kids learning to code.
> XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?)
My memory says that it was first implemented in IE 5.5, which was released in 2000. Wikipedia says [0] that it first appeared in IE 5.0 but with a different syntax.
Never made a game, but I have used this resource for many a graphical stand-in when prototyping some internal applications. Nothing more permanent than a temporary solution, so many of these icons are still used well after the MVP.
You can do a lot more to customize an icon with the “Studio” on this site as long as you’re using a desktop browser.
Pasting from the Studio page [1] (emphasis mine):
> The Studio is the set of tools displayed in the left column of each icon page when you browse the site on a large enough screen (sorry phone users).
> These various controls let you tweak the default icon to better suit your needs. Note that it's voluntarily quite rudimentary, and you should always rely on a complete editor like inkScape to do the heavy work.
Just because someone decided to be cheeky and call their license "unlicensed," doesn't mean I'm confused about what license are or aren't... If I wrote a license that granted no rights and decided to call it "Public Domain (TM)," would you also berate people who explained to other what actual "public domain" means?
I didn't berate you at all, my comment was pointing out the confusing naming of the unlicense. It was pretty obvious that I was being cheeky in my previous comment.
game-icons.net is great. I use it all the time for ad-hoc logos/emblems for characters/factions in pen&paper games.
I especially like the export options. Having _both_ PNG (optionally with transparent background) and SVG means the icons are almost always directly ready to use.
Indeed, you can make an icon system with gen AI, but you can't make a good one. It generally sucks at consistency and fine details-- two of the most important factors when designing a visual language for an interface. Ultimately, Gen AI icons are just like any other generative images for serious work-- they take care of the easiest (and most enjoyable) 90%, but the final 10% is usually harder and more annoying to tackle than if it had been made by a competent human. Maybe if you really need symbolic placeholders or for a low-usage hobby project?
"The details are not the details. They make the design."
While I agree with this in general, I think there's a place for AI in conjunction with icon sets like these. Control nets give you the ability to manually design the meaningful details and AI fill the remainder.
As someone who works in the space and uses these tools, I've not seen any output without significant manual modification that was production quality, and I've only heard developers or non-designer AI-enthusiasts say otherwise. I know people who are about as close to AI->Prod pipeline as you can feasibly get right now in games, but there's still a whole lot of Adobe in that process, even for chintzy mobile games. Not to sound arrogant, but developers judging whether or not an icon system is sufficient for its intended purpose is like a designer judging whether or not a codebase is technically solid for a given use case. People who don't produce work like this at a professional level love these tools because they abstract away most of the finer-grained decisions that artists and designers must make when producing images. But without that granular control, even with all the tweaking and inpainting and whatever else you can muster up, that AI is still making more choices about what goes into that composition than the prompter, and mitigating that is often more hassle than it's worth. Text-based AI tools just don't have the consistency or the specificity required for commercial art, and maybe never will. There's just a really big conceptual disconnect.
I also work in this space and use it already a lot. Super time and cost saving. Just less need for graphical designers. A bit of after care sometimes needed. But you dont need to be a designer for that.
Care to share a workflow? No doubt I've seen people make shitty assets more quickly, but nothing I'd consider useful for any of my purposes. Besides, the hard part of design is figuring out the best way to solve design problems visually, not making the assets. You can definitely save money on designers if you don't care about having good design.
To be clear: I didn't say that you don't know anything about design— I said that I've never seen a direct generative AI to production workflow that yielded acceptable professional-level results, and any time I've seen people saying otherwise, it was because they don't have experience evaluating design. You countered with a specific claim and no details. I asked for the details: a workflow that would change my mind. Since you haven't yielded anything, I'm not really sure what you're looking for here. I can't prove I that haven't seen something.
Many designers could cargo cult their way through modifying a WordPress instance, but it would be patently ridiculous for them to assume they knew code well enough to have their unsupported assertion about software development stand on its own against the word of an experienced, educated engineer. There are many ways to accomplish the same thing with code, but not all of them are good, and their suitability isn't entirely subjective.
Most facets of design aren't subjective, either: there are technical components that you can't just intuit your way through, and there's more wrong answers than right ones. I am qualified to assess design because I am an experienced, professional, University-trained designer that uses these tools regularly. Not everybody is, and I'm not going to sit here and pretend any random lay person's unsupported opinion rivals that. Sorry if that bothers you, but I'm always open to being proven wrong if you've got anything concrete to add.
> You countered with a specific claim and no details.
I did not. You're responding to different people.
A lot of great indie game developers started out as designers, and I think the overlap of skills are much greater than you think. Likewise it feels like gatekeeping to claim that coders are intrinsically bad at design.
> I did not. You're responding to different people.
My mistake.
I know exactly how much overlap there is. I was a full-time developer— mostly back-end web developer but not exclusively— for 10 years before I took the 60 old credits I had going for a computer science degree and started my BFA. While I've done a little completely non-technical design, like branding and identity and print design, most of what I've done is technical, and still do straight dev work from time to time. I've had one foot in each world and am professionally experienced in both, but mostly work in game engines these days.
The first programming book I read cover-to-cover, back in the late 90s, was Learning Perl by Larry Wall. He famously said the three most important characteristics of great developers are laziness, impatience, and most importantly for my point, hubris. I see his point— if you're overly conservative about estimating your capabilities, you probably won't attempt genuinely difficult challenges. That hubris helped me push myself, grow as a developer, and solve some cool problems. It also tends to make developers unwittingly look utterly cocky when talking to subject matter experts. More often than not, developers conflate understanding how computers interface with a problem with understanding the problem space itself, and since there is so much overlap, that happens with design more than anything else.
I've got probably 10k hours under my belt contributing to FOSS, but unless it was a project I helped maintain, zero (0) percent of that is design work... Even though I could do the job from research, to planning, to implementation. I actually know quite a few hybrid designer/developers for whom that's also true. I've certainly tried, but I haven't in years. Why? Because pretty much every FOSS project is maintained by developers, and almost without exception, they think their interfaces and processes are great, if quirky and a little ugly... But it's no problem as long as users RTFM. In reality, they're just used to the shitty interfaces, and because they lack experience evaluating design, they think that means they're objectively good. That's why you see commits in many repost for user-facing FOSS tools saying things like "addressed UX criticism by implementing custom color themes" which is absolute nonsense. It's also why the only user-facing FOSS tools popular among non-developers are controlled by corporations or foundations with project managers and professional designers. Left to their own devices, developers make interfaces that are only tolerable to people with a working mental model of software, under the hood.
The fact is, most developers that assume they know something about design only really know how designs are implemented technically, and for the actual design part, they're just winging it, mostly unknowingly mimicking designs they've seen. They tend to assume that design is mostly a matter of aesthetics and have no idea what the design processes entail, what problems design can and can't solve, or the tools designers wield to solve them. They build to satisfy their own use cases and aesthetic preferences without knowing how to evaluate their fitness for real use.
Gatekeeping would be saying that you needed formal training to be a designer, or that you're not a designer unless you use certain tools or processes. I knew a self-taught designer that became the art director for a national magazine and much of his creative process involved sketching things out in hyper card on a decades-old Mac Classic he had in his apartment. However, making the assets that a designer would make without doing any of the work that makes it design is not design, just like cargo-culting 4 deep nested for loops with database calls in a WordPress template is not engineering, even if the end result doesn't seem much different to lay people.
... human-made resources are still needed. Besides the questionable quality of AI art that doesn't address all needs, it's purely and simply forbidden within games published on Steam.
Uncanny valley is in a different place for almost everyone; I've seen proud posters in real life where the eyes didn't match, but also I've shown a friend a Stable Diffusion picture I thought was perfect and yet he knew instantly (and without me telling him) that it was GenAI, because to him all GenAI images look "dead" in a hard to describe way.
We're talking about small SVG icons. There's no "uncanny valley" to speak of.
I chose a random icon on the website to make a test. I generated the following image with dall-e and vectorized it in a couple of clicks in illustrator. https://i.imgur.com/dXWR0Zf.png Compare it with https://game-icons.net/1x1/delapouite/skimmer-hat.html Can you honestly tell that one is AI-generated and the other isn't? They're obviously of a very different style, but that's simply because that's what I chose out of the 4 options dall-e offered me.
> We're talking about small SVG icons. There's no "uncanny valley" to speak of.
Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean others can't.
And if they see AI where they don't want it, or even incorrectly think they do, oh boy can people hate it.
> Can you honestly tell that one is AI-generated and the other isn't?
Weirdly, the one on imgur does look AI generated to me, and I can't tell you why. Possibly just because I asked a Dall•E and SD for a bit of woodcut style art a while back and the meme is stuck in my mind, possibly something deeper.
I've been disappointed with DALL-E and others for small images such as icons and avatars. It will probably improve, but I wasn't satisfied with the results of my attempts so far.
Plenty of artists will need to find an alternative job, and the programmers aren't far away from getting the boot as well, when GenAI will product binaries ready to play.
genAI is still not allowed everywhere. I entered a game contest just a couple of weeks ago that explicitly forbade it.
In general the board game industry leaders (and many consumers) are not very receptive to genAI at this point. Probably still many years before it starts becoming a bit more accepted.
Not me, because I can't yet, but I can shed some light.
That comment brings nothing to the table. An upvote would have given the same meaning. This is not reddit, and some of us would prefer it to remain different. Low effort comments tend to be downvoted, and interesting ones upvoted.
So uplift your comments, say why you are thankful, what will be your use case, where you wouldn't use the OPs icons, ... give some information, not just noise.
Here [0] is some more information about downvotes.
quality control issue, dead simple to avoid that and the stasi on Steam
"woah red flag, here is some text that the developer added manually that doesn't fit the aesthetic" that's clearly a sign of laziness that is easily avoided
this is no better than those professors that tried to use an AI detector on their students
When I was in middle school and high school – late '90s and early '00s – I got heavily into forums and message boards. Customizing them was a major part of how I taught myself to code, and me and some friends spent a lot of time building RPG features into them. Shops, battle systems, and lots of other RPG and community features. Every action required a full page reload, as XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?)
There were no CC-licensed game asset collections, but there was a site, rpg-icons.com, that had a assets from many games, mostly RPGs. Breath of Fire, Harvest Moon, Final Fantasy, and so many more. I would spend hours looking through that site, searching for the perfect sprite to use for this or that item. It was a lot of fun to use assets from our favorite games to do our own creative thing. Maybe not super legal, per se, but still super fun.
I haven't done game stuff in almost 20 years, but almost my entire career has been web stuff. I'm glad resources like this – CC-licensed game assets – exist for today's kids learning to code.