Game Icons - My Week In Gamedev - 11/18 to 11/24

This week I started on my final class, The 2D Game Artist - Design Amazing Art Assets From Scratch which teaches the basics of 2D game art using the program GIMP. GIMP being a sort of pseudo Photoshop that is completely free. We created a lot of images so far for this course so I've only included the ones I think stand out best. I've also scaled the images way up for better viewing 😊

In this first week we focused on staying within the constraints of icon sized images. For this one we were to use only 8 pixels by 8 pixels and no color, just values of black to white. I made these three icons as part of the story "Walking the dog at the park."

In this next challenge we still only had 8 pixels by 8 pixels but were able to add in color. Here is my submission for the challenge "An astronaut goes to space."

At this point we were able to up the pixel count to 32 by 32 which allows a lot more room for gradients and shading. This challenge was for "a flag, an offensive weapon, a defensive weapon, and a mask of one of the previous icons."

Here we started expanding beyond hard edge tools (pencil) and started using soft edge tools like the brush and the air brush. This challenge was for "four fire based game icons using the brush and airbrush."

Four more game icons not from the same challenge but which pull together techniques from all the previous challenges such as using gradients and masks.

And to end off the first 34 lectures we arranged our game icons along a Diablo style action bar (which should be familiar to those who took the RPG course) to see how all our icon work was coming along so far.

Time to say goodbye to the icon section, take a little break with some Final Fantasy XIV, and start in again tomorrow with the animation section of the course. See you all again next week!