Attract-Mode Support Forum

Attract-Mode Support => Themes => Topic started by: zpaolo11x on November 19, 2018, 08:56:25 AM

Title: [RELEASED] Genres/Category artwork for Mame
Post by: zpaolo11x on November 19, 2018, 08:56:25 AM
I've completed a project to implement in the next version of my theme. The idea is to create genre or category icon for all my games. I had some rules to follow:

1) Being my theme Mame and arcade based I tried to find all the category names that are available, in catlist.ini, category.ini, catver.ini etc, then I parsed the genres/subgenre format so that, for example, Sports / Boxings becomes sportsboxing.png.

2) I wanted some retro look and a stylized vibe so I decided to limit myself to 16x16 pixels artwork with only one "color" (plus transparent background).

I decided to do all the subgenres and not only the main category, you can see a preview of the artwork here:

http://mixandmatch.it/catpic

Overall it's great fun trying to convey a category idea with that reduced resolution, also because if you want to reference a famous game for the genre sometimes you need to reinvent and scale down the sprites :)

In the attached archive you'll find all the PNGs in white on transparent (so you can change the color using set_rgb ), plus a nut to incorporate in your layout. The nut contains two function, one is category_pic() and is used as a magic token, so if you want to add a cat image just use

fe.add_image("[!category_pic]", etc

the other function in the nut is category_list() and you can call it at the beginning of your layout, it will output on the console the whole list of categories that are not present in the PNG folder. If you want me to add some just let me know!

Feel free to incorporate this icons (with credit) in your works and let me know if you like them :)
Title: Re: [WIP] Genres/Category artwork for Mame
Post by: ryuuji on November 19, 2018, 09:13:11 AM
good luck
Title: Re: [WIP] Genres/Category artwork for Mame
Post by: toothlessgrinn on November 21, 2018, 08:27:03 AM
cool man. this would go great with atari theme!!
Title: Re: [WIP] Genres/Category artwork for Mame
Post by: Giacomo1982 on November 21, 2018, 09:34:04 AM
Wow! I love pixel-art! Retro style is the best!
Title: Re: [WIP] Genres/Category artwork for Mame
Post by: zpaolo11x on November 21, 2018, 10:58:11 PM
cool man. this would go great with atari theme!!

That would fit perfectly, actually I took inspiration for many of my sprites from Atari games (arcade or VCS ports) to get that retro look :D
Title: Re: [WIP] Genres/Category artwork for Mame
Post by: zpaolo11x on November 21, 2018, 10:59:13 PM
Wow! I love pixel-art! Retro style is the best!

Indeed! I'm 136 done, 57 to go right now, so it's almost done, I still have to tweak some icons and then to export everything in PNG. Given that piskel doesn't allow mass export it will be a pain :D
Title: Re: [WIP] Genres/Category artwork for Mame
Post by: zpaolo11x on November 26, 2018, 09:36:23 AM
Almost done, I'll package everything and publish it here in the following days, for a preview you can see all the sprites I made here:

http://www.mixandmatch.it/catpng

They are black on white but should work also in reverse :)
Title: Re: [RELEASED] Genres/Category artwork for Mame
Post by: zpaolo11x on November 29, 2018, 11:44:52 PM
Updated some icons and posted the whole archive here :) Download it from the first post in the thread...
Title: Re: [RELEASED] Genres/Category artwork for Mame
Post by: Giacomo1982 on November 30, 2018, 09:50:05 AM
Awesome work! I'm great to implement all those artwork in all my next themes!

Thanks Paolo!