How to use Krita to draw a simple icon and populate our game resources folder…

"Asset Day": every other week, on Friday, I post a little timelapse or mini-post on how to create a specific game asset for the RTS project I develop throughout my Unity RTS programming tutorial.

Today, here is a timelapse of how I made a wood resource icon for my RTS game in Krita.

The timelapse

To get some inspiration, I searched for things like "wood pile icon" and "game wood icon" on my search engine and found some useful references:

Because the size of the icon in game is quite limited (only 24x24 pixels square), I knew I could do a small image but it had to be simple enough to be readable from "afar".

I also took advantage of the "multiply" layer mode in Krita to have my color directly lay under my initial contour strokes.

(Music by the author)

The result in the game

After integrating the icon in my game UI (the crude one we developed in a previous RTS programming tutorial), I get a nice little marker to directly spot the resource type. You can see my other resource icons beside it, by the way ;)

The tool: Krita

Krita is a free and open-source painting program that is very rich and full of features. I like the whole open-source philosophy and, in my opinion, it provides just as many tools and utilities as an Adobe Photoshop does — but then again, I am not a professional 2D artist so perhaps I don't realize it lacks an essential functionality?

To me, it's an amazing free tool that I'm far from having explored entirely: you can do basic image editing, more complex painting, frame-by-frame animation, vector or brush-based art and even Python scripting!

So go ahead and check it out next time you need an asset for your project! :)

If you liked this article, you can find more blog posts about tech, AI and programming on my website :)