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/catpicOverall 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
