Part 2: Iconography

Under construction

• One icon per place
• One place, multiple icons
• Places for icons
• Working with GameIcons.net

In the previous guide, we walked you through the basics of going from ideas in your head to a very simple set of cards ready for playtesting at the table. In this guide we take the next step: creating a visual language.

Art: Graphic Design vs. Illustration

A common piece of advice in the prototyping world is "Don't worry about artwork, just focus on the game and do the artwork later". That's good advice, but a bit over-simplified. What folks usually mean by "artwork" is really "illustration", like the cool oil painting of a wizard sitting in the middle of the card or the cool border around the edges.

But games are more than just artwork with text - they're a system of rules that need to be efficiently conveyed to the players. They're a visual language. When players are new to your game, the layout of the cards need to facilitate learning. When people are playing your game for the 30th time, though, they need the cards to maximize usability by reducing their memory load, moving gameplay along efficiently, and provide an overall aesthetic that conveys the game theme. That's what graphic design is all about, and that's much harder than commissioning an illustration.

Developing the visual language on your cards is not a trivial task. It's one that takes a lot of iteration, feedback, testing, improvement, failure, small successes, and reverse-engineering. It's something you should consider in your prototype early on. It's also a series of decisions that don't necessarily require artistic ability - just an intentional effort applied to usability.

Icons and the their placement are, perhaps, the most efficient and powerful tools in your toolbelt for conveying your game's world. In the prototyping process, you don't need to be worried about using icons that are your final icons, but you should put some thought into what the visuals will look like because you'll be iterating on that in the design process.

Iconography in Popular Games

When you get a chance, I highly recommend studying the iconography of some popular games. What works for you? What didn't? What kinds of choices did the designers make that works for their game? Here are a few that come my mind:

Race for the Galaxy

The majority of the cards in RFTG have no description text on them, and yet the game contains hundreds of unique cards. RFTG has a vast, rich visual iconography that conveys a all of the bonuses and trade-offs of a card efficiently to the user. As a drawback, though, the visual language can be intimidating to new players - every little symbol and icon means a new thing, and sometimes you just need to memorize that "this card does that", until you realize that the icons show that.

But once you know the structure of the game and what various bonuses mean, you can understand new cards very easily. Icons are combined in creative ways to show new bonuses. Text is used only when a bonus is much more complicated than what can be expressed with icons. Icons are primarily arranged along left side of the card so you can hold them in your hand and compare bonuses across cards quickly. All of these design decisions match the gameplay nicely because the game consists of a lot of scrolling through cards in your hand and evaluating which ones you want to play.

Dominion

Unlike RFTG, Dominion has a much simpler iconography. Most of the bonuses are conveyed in a paragraph of text in the description, with a few classifications conveyed by color or format. The text has icons embedded in it to tie in the concept of Gold, Curses, or Victory Points.

But Dominion's gameplay is much different: instead of going through tons of different cards, you're only playing with 10 piles of cards in front of you. So each game really just requires you to remember what 10 cards mean. Once you purchase a card and it goes into your deck, you don't need to evaluate its worth quickly as in RFTG because you already bought it. Having most of the game's bonuses in prose means that new bonuses are extremely flexible in their expression. As a result, Dominion's bonuses and iconography is much more about text and identifying known cards than about evaluating new ones.

How Squib Supports Iconography

• svg method, and all of its features like scaling, ID-specific rendering, direct XML manipulation, and all that the SVG file format has to offer
• png method, and all of its features like blending operators, alpha transparency,

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