6 ms·

Game-icons.net: Free icons for your games

338 points by stefankuehnel 3y ago

mock-possum 3y ago
“Popular ones with random colours” is a really cool way to show off the content, I’ve gotta remember that.
KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago
Now that we have genAI...
- gwervc 3y ago
  ... human-made resources are still needed. Besides the questionable quality of AI art that doesn't address all needs, it's purely and simply forbidden within games published on Steam.
  - uxp8u61q 3y ago
    How would valve even know that an icon is AI-generated?
    - Marazan 3y ago
      FAFO
    - ben_w 3y ago
      Uncanny valley is in a different place for almost everyone; I've seen proud posters in real life where the eyes didn't match, but also I've shown a friend a Stable Diffusion picture I thought was perfect and yet he knew instantly (and without me telling him) that it was GenAI, because to him all GenAI images look "dead" in a hard to describe way.
      - uxp8u61q 3y ago
        We're talking about small SVG icons. There's no "uncanny valley" to speak of. I chose a random icon on the website to make a test. I generated the following image with dall-e and vectorized it in a couple of clicks in illustrator. https://i.imgur.com/dXWR0Zf.png https://i.imgur.com/dXWR0Zf.png Compare it with https://game-icons.net/1x1/delapouite/skimmer-hat.html https://game-icons.net/1x1/delapouite/skimmer-hat.html Can you honestly tell that one is AI-generated and the other isn't? They're obviously of a very different style, but that's simply because that's what I chose out of the 4 options dall-e offered me.
        ben_w 3y ago
        > We're talking about small SVG icons. There's no "uncanny valley" to speak of. Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean others can't. And if they see AI where they don't want it, or even incorrectly think they do, oh boy can people hate it. > Can you honestly tell that one is AI-generated and the other isn't? Weirdly, the one on imgur does look AI generated to me, and I can't tell you why. Possibly just because I asked a Dall•E and SD for a bit of woodcut style art a while back and the meme is stuck in my mind, possibly something deeper.
- haolez 3y ago
  I've been disappointed with DALL-E and others for small images such as icons and avatars. It will probably improve, but I wasn't satisfied with the results of my attempts so far.
- Zuiii 3y ago
  All the ones I saw generate icons with weird artifacts. I don't think we're there yet.
- chefandy 3y ago
  Indeed, you can make an icon system with gen AI, but you can't make a good one. It generally sucks at consistency and fine details-- two of the most important factors when designing a visual language for an interface. Ultimately, Gen AI icons are just like any other generative images for serious work-- they take care of the easiest (and most enjoyable) 90%, but the final 10% is usually harder and more annoying to tackle than if it had been made by a competent human. Maybe if you really need symbolic placeholders or for a low-usage hobby project? "The details are not the details. They make the design." --Charles Eames
  - Lerc 3y ago
    While I agree with this in general, I think there's a place for AI in conjunction with icon sets like these. Control nets give you the ability to manually design the meaningful details and AI fill the remainder.
    - chefandy 3y ago
      As someone who works in the space and uses these tools, I've not seen any output without significant manual modification that was production quality, and I've only heard developers or non-designer AI-enthusiasts say otherwise. I know people who are about as close to AI->Prod pipeline as you can feasibly get right now in games, but there's still a whole lot of Adobe in that process, even for chintzy mobile games. Not to sound arrogant, but developers judging whether or not an icon system is sufficient for its intended purpose is like a designer judging whether or not a codebase is technically solid for a given use case. People who don't produce work like this at a professional level love these tools because they abstract away most of the finer-grained decisions that artists and designers must make when producing images. But without that granular control, even with all the tweaking and inpainting and whatever else you can muster up, that AI is still making more choices about what goes into that composition than the prompter, and mitigating that is often more hassle than it's worth. Text-based AI tools just don't have the consistency or the specificity required for commercial art, and maybe never will. There's just a really big conceptual disconnect.
      - deleted 3y ago
- cableshaft 3y ago
  genAI is still not allowed everywhere. I entered a game contest just a couple of weeks ago that explicitly forbade it. In general the board game industry leaders (and many consumers) are not very receptive to genAI at this point. Probably still many years before it starts becoming a bit more accepted.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Plenty of artists will need to find an alternative job, and the programmers aren't far away from getting the boot as well, when GenAI will product binaries ready to play.
fbdab103 3y ago
Never made a game, but I have used this resource for many a graphical stand-in when prototyping some internal applications. Nothing more permanent than a temporary solution, so many of these icons are still used well after the MVP.
hyperific 3y ago
Thanks for sharing!
- hyperific 3y ago
  Why would someone downvote this?
  - JaumeGreen 3y ago
    Not me, because I can't yet, but I can shed some light. That comment brings nothing to the table. An upvote would have given the same meaning. This is not reddit, and some of us would prefer it to remain different. Low effort comments tend to be downvoted, and interesting ones upvoted. So uplift your comments, say why you are thankful, what will be your use case, where you wouldn't use the OPs icons, ... give some information, not just noise. Here [0] is some more information about downvotes. [0] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvoting-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...
AntiMS 3y ago
Any idea what the license terms are on these? Or are they unlicensed outside of Japan and therefore free for use in most of the world?
- detour 3y ago
  CC BY 3.0
  - AntiMS 3y ago
    Thanks!
- uxp8u61q 3y ago
  I think you're confused. If something is unlicensed, it means you don't have a license, and so you cannot use it.
  - gardenhedge 3y ago
    Or do it the OpenAI way. Put it through a AI model mixer and use the output from that /s
  - kristofferR 3y ago
    No, you're confused, because this is confusing: https://unlicense.org/ https://unlicense.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicense So if something is unlicensed (no license) you would be correct, but if something is unlicensed (unlicensed license) you would be incorrect...
    - uxp8u61q 3y ago
      Just because someone decided to be cheeky and call their license "unlicensed," doesn't mean I'm confused about what license are or aren't... If I wrote a license that granted no rights and decided to call it "Public Domain (TM)," would you also berate people who explained to other what actual "public domain" means?
AnonHP 3y ago
These look nice. You can do a lot more to customize an icon with the “Studio” on this site as long as you’re using a desktop browser. Pasting from the Studio page [1] (emphasis mine): > The Studio is the set of tools displayed in the left column of each icon page when you browse the site on a large enough screen (sorry phone users). > These various controls let you tweak the default icon to better suit your needs. Note that it's voluntarily quite rudimentary, and you should always rely on a complete editor like inkScape to do the heavy work. [1]: https://game-icons.net/studio.html https://game-icons.net/studio.html
hannofcart 3y ago
These look fabulous. Another great resource for free 2D game assets: https://kenney.nl/assets https://kenney.nl/assets No affiliation with them whatsoever. Just a happy and grateful user.
- freeCandy 3y ago
  Fun fact, Kenney made the Armor games logo: https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1362768014895157249 https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1362768014895157249
Fileformat 3y ago
Shameless self-promotion: My Icon Search site searches these icons & a whole bunch more https://iconsear.ch/ https://iconsear.ch/
Jowsey 3y ago
Love these, have used them in a bunch of games and they generally fit in great with any other style you're using, huge vouch
yieldcrv 3y ago
AI image models can do this pretty quickly too btw and I literally think you’re prompting it wrong if you think otherwise, we are 100% at an impasse
- Marazan 3y ago
  https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1738549235119751531 https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1738549235119751531
  - yieldcrv 3y ago
    quality control issue, dead simple to avoid that and the stasi on Steam "woah red flag, here is some text that the developer added manually that doesn't fit the aesthetic" that's clearly a sign of laziness that is easily avoided this is no better than those professors that tried to use an AI detector on their students
CasperH2O 3y ago
Nice resource! I've been contributing regularly to PromptFont [1], various gamepad icons in SVG format for use in game. It also has a nice overview website [2]. [1] https://github.com/Shinmera/promptfont https://github.com/Shinmera/promptfont [2] https://shinmera.github.io/promptfont/ https://shinmera.github.io/promptfont/
klauserc 3y ago
game-icons.net is great. I use it all the time for ad-hoc logos/emblems for characters/factions in pen&paper games. I especially like the export options. Having _both_ PNG (optionally with transparent background) and SVG means the icons are almost always directly ready to use.
kragen 3y ago
this looks excellent! if you are looking for this, you might also be looking for https://opengameart.org/ https://opengameart.org/ and https://openclipart.org/ https://openclipart.org/
dmpayton 3y ago
This triggered a memory from my early days of learning to code... When I was in middle school and high school – late '90s and early '00s – I got heavily into forums and message boards. Customizing them was a major part of how I taught myself to code, and me and some friends spent a lot of time building RPG features into them. Shops, battle systems, and lots of other RPG and community features. Every action required a full page reload, as XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?) There were no CC-licensed game asset collections, but there was a site, rpg-icons.com, that had a assets from many games, mostly RPGs. Breath of Fire, Harvest Moon, Final Fantasy, and so many more. I would spend hours looking through that site, searching for the perfect sprite to use for this or that item. It was a lot of fun to use assets from our favorite games to do our own creative thing. Maybe not super legal, per se, but still super fun. I haven't done game stuff in almost 20 years, but almost my entire career has been web stuff. I'm glad resources like this – CC-licensed game assets – exist for today's kids learning to code.
- BerislavLopac 3y ago
  > XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?) My memory says that it was first implemented in IE 5.5, which was released in 2000. Wikipedia says [0] that it first appeared in IE 5.0 but with a different syntax. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History
franze 3y ago
I became a little bit addicted to built games with emojis - it gives them a familiar casual feel - most unfinished but those 2 work fine https://flapimoji.franzai.com/ https://flapimoji.franzai.com/ https://interdimensional-chimney.franzai.com/ https://interdimensional-chimney.franzai.com/ and a little bit https://updownredgreenetc.franzai.com/ https://updownredgreenetc.franzai.com/

338 points by stefankuehnel 3y ago

mock-possum 3y ago

“Popular ones with random colours” is a really cool way to show off the content, I’ve gotta remember that.

KaoruAoiShiho 3y ago

Now that we have genAI...

gwervc 3y ago
... human-made resources are still needed. Besides the questionable quality of AI art that doesn't address all needs, it's purely and simply forbidden within games published on Steam.
- uxp8u61q 3y ago
  How would valve even know that an icon is AI-generated?
  - Marazan 3y ago
    FAFO
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Uncanny valley is in a different place for almost everyone; I've seen proud posters in real life where the eyes didn't match, but also I've shown a friend a Stable Diffusion picture I thought was perfect and yet he knew instantly (and without me telling him) that it was GenAI, because to him all GenAI images look "dead" in a hard to describe way.
    - uxp8u61q 3y ago
      We're talking about small SVG icons. There's no "uncanny valley" to speak of. I chose a random icon on the website to make a test. I generated the following image with dall-e and vectorized it in a couple of clicks in illustrator. https://i.imgur.com/dXWR0Zf.png https://i.imgur.com/dXWR0Zf.png Compare it with https://game-icons.net/1x1/delapouite/skimmer-hat.html https://game-icons.net/1x1/delapouite/skimmer-hat.html Can you honestly tell that one is AI-generated and the other isn't? They're obviously of a very different style, but that's simply because that's what I chose out of the 4 options dall-e offered me.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        > We're talking about small SVG icons. There's no "uncanny valley" to speak of. Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean others can't. And if they see AI where they don't want it, or even incorrectly think they do, oh boy can people hate it. > Can you honestly tell that one is AI-generated and the other isn't? Weirdly, the one on imgur does look AI generated to me, and I can't tell you why. Possibly just because I asked a Dall•E and SD for a bit of woodcut style art a while back and the meme is stuck in my mind, possibly something deeper.
haolez 3y ago
I've been disappointed with DALL-E and others for small images such as icons and avatars. It will probably improve, but I wasn't satisfied with the results of my attempts so far.
Zuiii 3y ago
All the ones I saw generate icons with weird artifacts. I don't think we're there yet.
chefandy 3y ago
Indeed, you can make an icon system with gen AI, but you can't make a good one. It generally sucks at consistency and fine details-- two of the most important factors when designing a visual language for an interface. Ultimately, Gen AI icons are just like any other generative images for serious work-- they take care of the easiest (and most enjoyable) 90%, but the final 10% is usually harder and more annoying to tackle than if it had been made by a competent human. Maybe if you really need symbolic placeholders or for a low-usage hobby project? "The details are not the details. They make the design." --Charles Eames
- Lerc 3y ago
  While I agree with this in general, I think there's a place for AI in conjunction with icon sets like these. Control nets give you the ability to manually design the meaningful details and AI fill the remainder.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    As someone who works in the space and uses these tools, I've not seen any output without significant manual modification that was production quality, and I've only heard developers or non-designer AI-enthusiasts say otherwise. I know people who are about as close to AI->Prod pipeline as you can feasibly get right now in games, but there's still a whole lot of Adobe in that process, even for chintzy mobile games. Not to sound arrogant, but developers judging whether or not an icon system is sufficient for its intended purpose is like a designer judging whether or not a codebase is technically solid for a given use case. People who don't produce work like this at a professional level love these tools because they abstract away most of the finer-grained decisions that artists and designers must make when producing images. But without that granular control, even with all the tweaking and inpainting and whatever else you can muster up, that AI is still making more choices about what goes into that composition than the prompter, and mitigating that is often more hassle than it's worth. Text-based AI tools just don't have the consistency or the specificity required for commercial art, and maybe never will. There's just a really big conceptual disconnect.
    - deleted 3y ago
cableshaft 3y ago
genAI is still not allowed everywhere. I entered a game contest just a couple of weeks ago that explicitly forbade it. In general the board game industry leaders (and many consumers) are not very receptive to genAI at this point. Probably still many years before it starts becoming a bit more accepted.
pjmlp 3y ago
Plenty of artists will need to find an alternative job, and the programmers aren't far away from getting the boot as well, when GenAI will product binaries ready to play.

fbdab103 3y ago

Never made a game, but I have used this resource for many a graphical stand-in when prototyping some internal applications. Nothing more permanent than a temporary solution, so many of these icons are still used well after the MVP.

hyperific 3y ago

Thanks for sharing!

hyperific 3y ago
Why would someone downvote this?
- JaumeGreen 3y ago
  Not me, because I can't yet, but I can shed some light. That comment brings nothing to the table. An upvote would have given the same meaning. This is not reddit, and some of us would prefer it to remain different. Low effort comments tend to be downvoted, and interesting ones upvoted. So uplift your comments, say why you are thankful, what will be your use case, where you wouldn't use the OPs icons, ... give some information, not just noise. Here [0] is some more information about downvotes. [0] https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvoting-comments https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#downvo...

AntiMS 3y ago

Any idea what the license terms are on these? Or are they unlicensed outside of Japan and therefore free for use in most of the world?

detour 3y ago
CC BY 3.0
- AntiMS 3y ago
  Thanks!
uxp8u61q 3y ago
I think you're confused. If something is unlicensed, it means you don't have a license, and so you cannot use it.
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  Or do it the OpenAI way. Put it through a AI model mixer and use the output from that /s
- kristofferR 3y ago
  No, you're confused, because this is confusing: https://unlicense.org/ https://unlicense.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicense https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlicense So if something is unlicensed (no license) you would be correct, but if something is unlicensed (unlicensed license) you would be incorrect...
  - uxp8u61q 3y ago
    Just because someone decided to be cheeky and call their license "unlicensed," doesn't mean I'm confused about what license are or aren't... If I wrote a license that granted no rights and decided to call it "Public Domain (TM)," would you also berate people who explained to other what actual "public domain" means?

AnonHP 3y ago

These look nice. You can do a lot more to customize an icon with the “Studio” on this site as long as you’re using a desktop browser. Pasting from the Studio page [1] (emphasis mine): > The Studio is the set of tools displayed in the left column of each icon page when you browse the site on a large enough screen (sorry phone users). > These various controls let you tweak the default icon to better suit your needs. Note that it's voluntarily quite rudimentary, and you should always rely on a complete editor like inkScape to do the heavy work. [1]: https://game-icons.net/studio.html https://game-icons.net/studio.html

hannofcart 3y ago

These look fabulous. Another great resource for free 2D game assets: https://kenney.nl/assets https://kenney.nl/assets No affiliation with them whatsoever. Just a happy and grateful user.

freeCandy 3y ago
Fun fact, Kenney made the Armor games logo: https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1362768014895157249 https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1362768014895157249

Fileformat 3y ago

Shameless self-promotion: My Icon Search site searches these icons & a whole bunch more https://iconsear.ch/ https://iconsear.ch/

Jowsey 3y ago

Love these, have used them in a bunch of games and they generally fit in great with any other style you're using, huge vouch

yieldcrv 3y ago

AI image models can do this pretty quickly too btw and I literally think you’re prompting it wrong if you think otherwise, we are 100% at an impasse

Marazan 3y ago
https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1738549235119751531 https://twitter.com/KenneyNL/status/1738549235119751531
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  quality control issue, dead simple to avoid that and the stasi on Steam "woah red flag, here is some text that the developer added manually that doesn't fit the aesthetic" that's clearly a sign of laziness that is easily avoided this is no better than those professors that tried to use an AI detector on their students

CasperH2O 3y ago

Nice resource! I've been contributing regularly to PromptFont [1], various gamepad icons in SVG format for use in game. It also has a nice overview website [2]. [1] https://github.com/Shinmera/promptfont https://github.com/Shinmera/promptfont [2] https://shinmera.github.io/promptfont/ https://shinmera.github.io/promptfont/

klauserc 3y ago

game-icons.net is great. I use it all the time for ad-hoc logos/emblems for characters/factions in pen&paper games. I especially like the export options. Having _both_ PNG (optionally with transparent background) and SVG means the icons are almost always directly ready to use.

kragen 3y ago

this looks excellent! if you are looking for this, you might also be looking for https://opengameart.org/ https://opengameart.org/ and https://openclipart.org/ https://openclipart.org/

dmpayton 3y ago

This triggered a memory from my early days of learning to code... When I was in middle school and high school – late '90s and early '00s – I got heavily into forums and message boards. Customizing them was a major part of how I taught myself to code, and me and some friends spent a lot of time building RPG features into them. Shops, battle systems, and lots of other RPG and community features. Every action required a full page reload, as XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?) There were no CC-licensed game asset collections, but there was a site, rpg-icons.com, that had a assets from many games, mostly RPGs. Breath of Fire, Harvest Moon, Final Fantasy, and so many more. I would spend hours looking through that site, searching for the perfect sprite to use for this or that item. It was a lot of fun to use assets from our favorite games to do our own creative thing. Maybe not super legal, per se, but still super fun. I haven't done game stuff in almost 20 years, but almost my entire career has been web stuff. I'm glad resources like this – CC-licensed game assets – exist for today's kids learning to code.

BerislavLopac 3y ago
> XMLHttpRequest wasn't a widely known thing yet. (I didn't hear of it until maybe '04 or '05, but it looks like it first appeared in '99?) My memory says that it was first implemented in IE 5.5, which was released in 2000. Wikipedia says [0] that it first appeared in IE 5.0 but with a different syntax. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMLHttpRequest#History

franze 3y ago

I became a little bit addicted to built games with emojis - it gives them a familiar casual feel - most unfinished but those 2 work fine https://flapimoji.franzai.com/ https://flapimoji.franzai.com/ https://interdimensional-chimney.franzai.com/ https://interdimensional-chimney.franzai.com/ and a little bit https://updownredgreenetc.franzai.com/ https://updownredgreenetc.franzai.com/