[req] dude icons

Ok, next week is finals week for me, so I won't have anything right away, but I'll plan on trying to make them.

Anyone else is free to give a go at it also.

Those balls are starting to look pretty good.

Ah, well, so I had been working on a path similar to Sak, with a stylized spherebot design. Unfortuntely it doesn't work well at 16x16.



What I had in mind was to use this as the base. Ranking would be determined by a league icon set in the background. Obviously there are no leagues yet, much less league insignia, but here is a sample:



Spherebot color would then represent other things, like community status (admin, dev, contributor).

The reverse could also be done, with spherebot colors for rankings and background icons for community status.

Friend status is kind of a special status, so it could have a different symbol floating around there:



So if I make any progress on this it will be to try to make 16x16 usable, work out league designs, and set up my source file so that icons can be automatically generated for easy maintenance.

Ok, that's more helpful. You would need veteran bias to think of glaive icons as machinery, because you already know it's a robot. The natural inclination of people is to find human shapes in objects; this is why we can look at a futuristic suit of armor and see a person there.



If the image is bad and indistinct though, then it is just bad and indistinct. I'll try to tweak it, although it is literally just a vector trace over a screenshot.



I want it to look like a glaive, because it has a humanoid shape, but mostly because it is the iconic unit of zk.

Leagues would be for aesthetics mostly, not actually to split the playerbase.

Actually it isn't much different in starcraft 2. League is different than your hidden real ranking, so you will often find yourself matched against players in a higher or lower league.

That sounds about perfect actually licho.

I figured out imagemagick enough to colorize in batch, so tweaking or adding new colors is minimal work. My rankings here don't need to be official yet.

Copper:


Bronze:


Silver:


Gold:


Diamond:

quote: Do you think some dots would fit into that icon to actually map every level to icon? up to 100 Or is there no room? (problem would be used to generate them probably or combine from two pieces)

That isn't a problem so much. I already tried to tackle this before; I can make the parts as inkscape layers and then export in batch mode.

The real trick is to make anything comprehensible at 16x16, and still look 'good' in a way that immerses the player. The most efficient way would be to just literally use small numbers, but that isn't as fun.

I can give it another look though.

Thanks all for the feedback. I have been using this page as a baseline: http://code.google.com/p/zero-k/wiki/LevelRankBadge
(Where the idea originated from anyway)

So the next step is to also have faction-based banners behind insignia for the website. Kind of like it currently is now, except instead of red for everyone it will be your faction color. So I'll be tweaking colors as suggested, but also in a way that nothing clashes too terribly with banners also.

Basically at 16x16 its a huge tradeoff in following pixels tightly for a clearer image but crappier design:



Or a better design but blurrier image:



(The second image is actually an attempt from a few months back)
(Wow, first one is pretty blurry still)

Not really feeling this route, as 9 levels fits awkwardly into 16 pixels. If I make level progression more than 1 pixel each time, the ends look inconsistent. If it is only 1 pixel progression, a full bar will just be a little over half the icon width/height.

Anyone is welcome/encouraged to show me otherwise, but I just don't think that you can have 100 levels in that size and still look clear/nice.