The Process:

Everything began as I was making the menus of my upcoming puzzle game “Artifice”. I thought to myself “wouldn’t it be cool if the menu buttons had little icons next to the text to make everything more understandable and visually pleasing?” For reference, my main menu had like 4 buttons at the time. However, after making these 4 icons, I enjoyed the creation process and went WAY overboard – “wouldn’t it be fun to make icons for this and this and THIS?”

And here we are, two months later, with 1300 icons. I don’t know how I do these things. I really should learn to put a stop to my scope creep. Also, my game’s development is halted because of this, I haven’t really worked on it much for the past month (I’ll continue it, I promise!).

At first I was making all the icons in one spritesheet that grew from 8x8, then 16x16, then 32x32, at which point it was really overwhelming to look at, I had trouble finding icons I had made minutes ago, and everything was quite the mess. See for yourselves:

At that point I decided that it might be better to split it into separate sprite sheets, so people (and me, lol) could find what they were looking for without staring at a huge spritesheet intensely for minutes on end.

Speaking of searching, I was worried that even in separate spritesheets, icons would still be hard to find, so I decided to split them into individual sprites (and I also wanted to count how many there were). The naming of these sprites might seem confusing at first, but search-ability is the main reason for it. I just poured all the keywords that apply to each individual sprite in the file name, until I ended up with charming names like:

“RPG_Item_Weapon_Sword_Attack_Melee_Slashing_Damage.png”

(and I did this 1300 times. Yeah. I severely underestimated how long this task would take.)

So if you were to search any of these terms, you would hopefully find what you’re looking for.

The Reasons:

I believe that everyone should have free access to high quality icons for their games, because with so little effort they enhance the visuals and understanding of text so much, making it more accessible to people with dyslexia or those who don’t speak the language that well, helping them learn and understand. I wish everyone used more icons in their menus, games (ARPG item tooltips, I’m looking at you!), software tools, board games, sites, instruction manuals and everywhere else you might think of.

If you’ve been following me and seen my other assets here on itch (hi and thanks by the way <3), you’ll know that I don’t usually give all of my work for free, but I decided to make an exception for this one, due to the reasons above. So I released it as CC0. It’s free for everyone, no strings attached. Use it for whatever you wish.

That being said, making this pack still took me about two months of hard pixeling, and I’d be very grateful if you were to support me by donating when downloading the pack, or buying any of my paid assets. Thank you, and happy gamedev’ing!