Nomnisang

Hi. I'm Matt. I'm 27, and I didn't really get into gaming until highschool, when my parents let me get the original Xbox. One of the first games I dove into was KotOR II. I loved it so much that I it made me want to become a video game writer. Sadly, I never was able to get my foot in the door, but I did meet Chris Avellone at GDC one year, so that was awesome! I joined Deadly Stream earlier today at the behest of Xuul, and I've started recreating several of the icons from KotOR II in my spare time, which I hope to continue. My project has received warm reviews from the community thus far, and I'm grateful for the support.

I have no intention of abandoning the project. However, if I do, I fully intend to leave a style guide, as well as documentation going over how I made these. I'll let you in on a secret right now: This is all done using the shapes tool and thoughtful use of gradient overlays and gradient strokes. The most complicated element thus far was making the blaster, which I used the pen tool for. The only non-vector part of any of these was a motion blur used in Contention and Lightsaber Finesse. I'll tell you this: Once you have a basic element built, it's incredibly simple to build these. It's when you get into an element that will only show up once that time management becomes an issue. Before too long, I should probably make the skill icons, since they're prominently featured on the level-up screen, and they each have their own feat. Also, the finesse icons are a little wierd. Are these right? Because the lightsaber is a sword, and the melee finesse is a series of Blasters.

That's brilliant. I'm adding that to my notes. Don't worry. All of these are being saved with their Layers and smart objects in Photoshop as individual files. This way, if I find a better way to render these images, I can go back and bring those older images back in line with the rest.

In that case, what I might end up doing is getting the exact proportions that the game stretches the icons and slim them manually in photoshop. That will mean that there will be blank margins, but the icons themselves should be rendered in the intended proportions. I plan to come back to "Heal" when I have a few more icons done, so that I can try to keep the look consistent. I'm taking all of the criticism's thus far and using them to build icons that are faithful to the game. My original intent with the Heal icon was to stylize it, like a skull on a bust. Now that this has become a larger project, I'm focusing on fidelity. [Edit] I've updated the thread's title because I noticed that the home page shows recent posts, along with the thread's full title. My original title was kind of lengthy, and pushed too much of the content out of view. I still welcome feedback while I get thing project going.

I've worked on some additional assets this evening. I was picking feats with swords from my library, but I decided to knock out a complete feat chain. Also, thank you Xuul for recomending this community. I'm going to try not to spam posts while I make progress.

It's been years since I've played KotOR II, and like many, I came back to it after the update last month. While I'm still very much in love with the game, some parts of it have not aged well. One thing I've noticed in particular are the low resolution icons. They are 32x32 pixels, and they tend to get fuzzy. After a brief search, I've yet to find any mods that upscale that either raise the resolution for any UI elements, or remaster the icons. Thus, I've started rebuilding some of the icons from KotOR II. My goal is to get all the force powers, feats and other related icons upscaled, and to upscale them with a faithfulness to the original design. I am not a modder. My experience is mostly in graphic design, so I don't have the knowledge to get these images into the game yet. So far, I'm trying to make icons that will scale properly. Some detail will be lost along the way, which is to be expected, but my goal is to have the icon remain faithful to the original. The Heal icon in this example is not as faithful as I'd like it to be. The Mandalorian Courage icon is less detailed, but far more faithful when scaled down. The Lightsaber forms, which as the least complex of the icons I've made thus far, feel the most faithful. These icons also have the most reuseable elements. Given that there are 88 force powers and 180+ feats, having reuseable assets is going to be essential to this project. The main challenges I'm going to hit will be technical execution, time management and graphic fidelity. From what I've seen, I may need to edit all of the icon's width since the widescreen fixes in the last patch warped the UI. I also do not know what optimal image size will be yet, but I'm currently hoping to make all of these between 128x and 512x. Once I know how much detail I need, I'm sure that my workflow will improve. Before I delve too far, I'm hoping to get some feedback in order to improve my asthetic before I venture too far. Mandalorian Courage and the Lightsaber forms are the most accurate depictions of what I'm shooting for.