Inked Adventure Items released!

After having released Inked Adventure Items a week ago, I finally come around to post a proper launch announcement. I'm also finally trying out itch.io's devlog feature! Inked Adventure Items is a set of 108 hand-drawn items for action-adventures, roguelikes, crafting or survival, available right here. Below, I'm going to explain a bit about how I created the icons.

The animated cover of the asset pack.

My intention was to make a set of item icons in an inked style, as there are already a lot of pixel art icon sets available. To narrow down the items, I took inspiration from games like Zelda, Don't Starve and Darkest Dungeon to ensure that there's enough variation within the set of 108 items. I started with very small, scribbled doodles to get hold of the item ideas and also to get a feeling of how to present the items in regard to layout within the small item frames. It actually took me some days of experimentation within Krita, going through different brushes, brush sizes and overall styles, until I've set with a comic style. This enabled simple silhouettes and bigger empty areas within the lines for easier recognition—in contrast to a more realistic style where details would confuse the viewer, especially within a tiny space as small as 64x64 or 32x32 pixels.

Sketches on paper.

Instead of handling single icon files, I drew the item icons within a showcase file, which is part of the package you'll get when buying the pack. This allowed me to easily cross-reference the yet-to-draw with the already-drawn, to ensure that I stay within the bounds of the style. Every now and then I filled the icons with the grayscale palette colors (light, medium, dark) to test how they'll look like with different types of shading. After I finished drawing the icons, I've already learned that a more delicate shading, e.g. within the tool and weapon handles or other thin areas, is either hard to recognize or gives the items a weird plastic look which doesn't harmonize with the overall doodle line work. The asset pack includes a little tutorial file which goes into more detail and assists in drawing in the same style.

Drawing within the showcase file.

For the export, I'm saving the showcase file with a transparent background in all the different filling variants. I've actually wrote a little console application which cuts out the item icons from those showcase exports and generates all the icon files (including a version scaled to 32x32) as well as compiles the sprite sheets and zips up the final archive, ready to go. I hope the tool will come to use for future asset packs.

12 icons from the set.

Anyway, thank you for reading and I hope you'll have a look into Inked Adventure Items! If you have questions or want to share some ideas for items you think should be part of the asset pack, please leave a comment below! :3

Best regards,
Steven