FreeOrion

There's an easy solution to that: spend less time on each drawing. A 10 second sketching on 1 square inch of paper is enough time to flesh out one rough idea. Think of all the things related to your topic and draw it no matter how stupid it seems (most of them won't make any sense). Spend 10 minutes doing that and you will have roughly 60 drawings if my math is correct. Pick the coolest of those and spend 5 more minutes on a larger version of it. Grand total of 15 minutes.

You don't have to do it, but you will save loads of time if you can do it.

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Photo-dump.

Musings

Thanks guys, will flesh it out:

Here are a few examples of the lighthouse. Some are... okay, others ... suck. Anyway just wanted to try my hand. Any feedback is welcome.

















These are double the size of the actual icon, but when sized down they still look relatively good. For example:

For future reference, it's best to keep all your pictures limited to 128x128...only.

And your pictures are good in the stylized sense, but IMO they need more detail. Not too much or they're garbage, but just a bit more. I'm horrible with icons but I've seen enough to think I can semi-judge what would be good for the game or not. Then again I could be wrong.

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Photobucket account for FreeOrion and List of Techs and Icons

[[[===LEAN, MEAN, PURPLE AND GREEN MACHINE===]]]

Working in such a resultion is fine and is what I would recommend, but for presentation purposes, it's enough to show the resolution that they are meant to be.

You are on the right track. The last one works best in my opinion, although it needs some work regarding its balance. The upper, very graphic part is fine.

edit: I just noticed that we already have an icon for interstellar lighthouses, which works quite well and which shows the "interstellar" side pretty nicely. This aspect is lacking in your icon or at least kept very minimal by just using some stars. So, I don't know if it's worth exploring this further, because at the moment your icon just says "lighthouse"...

redcap is putting me to shame


the lines appear quite thin in the tech screen now, but essentially unchanged from the previous.


Used the original void mind as a backdrop

The paradise planet icon lends itself well to casino/gambling scene images. (poker chips, dice, poker cards, roulette wheels, etc, neon lights, strip clubs etc.) I've got to go find some.

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Photo-dump.

Musings

That is fine, if anything I am just practicing and getting a hand and feel for the icons. I have checked the list and interstellar lighthouse was an x. Please can someone tell me what is or isn't done so I can do something useful, is the list just not updated?

You might have to clear your browser cache. The icon was committed to SVN on February 21th and I believe the tech icon list includes it since then as well. The list is up to date, only Josh's latest big contribution(March 23rd) is missing.

Okay, lets try this again

Going for an externality economics: Any thoughts?

Forgot one

Getting better, but still not as good as I think it could be: once again this is for externality economics

We already have one for Externality Integration, Redcap. Concentrate on trying to create icons for things that have nothing there to start with. Additionally, externality economics is not just about "people getting along" and thinking about others, as is insinuated in your icons and what I remember from your earlier post on the subject. It's about all factors outside the realm of the immediate consequences that would occur for the decision maker; all factors, in many areas, with much complexity. I believe the icon we have now is better suited to the description of the tech.

Try thinking of something for galactic infrastructure.

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Photobucket account for FreeOrion and List of Techs and Icons

[[[===LEAN, MEAN, PURPLE AND GREEN MACHINE===]]]

General Advice:

Make the shapes as bold and simple as possible while maintaining meaning.
128x128 is not the minimum size, it's the max size... the icons will frequently be displayed as smaller sizes in the tech tree when the player zooms out.

Here's a couple i did for 2 terraforming techs (regular terraforming and rapid terraforming). I'm not overwhelmingly proud of them, but they hold up pretty well down even at 33% of 128.

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Thank you, that is all I wanted. I will try my best

Galactic Infrastructure:

So before trying to make some icons I looked up what infrastructure meant, read the tech page's description of this technology, and in short everything pointed towards basically how a society operates. Namely through transportation, water, electricity, power, food, ect. So I looked up online for some ideas and everything I found was basically a road or railroad coming from a city, representing a cities infrastructure. So using this idea I have a type of road coming from a planet with a bright star or sun and buildings and a planet in the background. The road represents transportation, the buildings represent housing or the community, the bright light in the center represents energy but also the galactic side to the icon. And finally the planets and stars also represent the galactic portion of the icon. I made four similiar but slightly different icons. Any feedback or critism is welcome: