Added Sheepy: A Short Adventure icons

[E-man-dev]

Add icons for the game "Sheepy: A Short Adventure".
The game is also available from itch.io, but necessity of separate symbolic links for itch.io unknown.
Original icon on Linux (the one I was referencing):

[E-man-dev]

Forgot to add a preview of what my proposed icon looks like:

[achadwick]

Cute character, and a cute icon! I really like the layering going on here.

I wonder if we could push the contrast between elements with https://www.color-contrast.dev a bit? Aim for APCA Lc ±45, for fine graphics where shapes matter, Lc ±30 for discerning outlines of big blocks of colour on top of another, and Lc ±15 bare absolute minimum for discernibility. It goes a bit like this:

Or even make the shape more figure focused? Logo-inna-circle is a bit of a cliché, and this little sheep might work without it. The result is often better shape outlines. I adjusted the shape of the head to make the top more elliptical and domed. You'll probably have to redo the shadows, and the #ccc wool becomes a fixed colour that you have to adjust the contrast of any base or background around. My attempt looks like this, but perhaps you don't even need the blue element at all.

I think the face should be recessed, as if it's a cutout in the wool. I like what you've done with the nose shadow vs. the eyes to give a hint of a protruding muzzle, though!

[achadwick]

EDIT: actually, ignore this. I can adjust the commit message for style in a squash-and-merge. I always forget that bit. You'll still get full credit, of course!

One small technical thing: could you reword the commit message to 50 characters or less, please? See the guide at https://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html. You will need to do a forced push, and perhaps a rebase to catch up.

git checkout sheepy-a-short-adventure    # and make sure you have a clean working state
git rebase origin/master      # restacks your changes on top of recent changes here
git commit --amend   # opens $EDITOR on the last commit message
git push --force     # may need to specify this remote branch again, "push -u" so you don't have to next time

You can amend previous commits with "git gui" too.

[achadwick]

Hi @E-man-dev -

Do you still have the time to work on this? I'd like to get it merged in the next few days.

I'd love to know which idea you prefer more from the two in #4094 (comment)

[E-man-dev]

Hey @achadwick !
Sorry for the delay! I won't be able to make much progress on it tonight, but I will try to have it done before the end of the weekend. I do like the idea of not having a background... I will change my design accordingly. Besides contrast for accessibility, I did also finally figure out I can make slight adjustments to the design per size to get pixel alignment across all resolutions.

[E-man-dev]

@achadwick I had a few moments tonight to noodle around with the design a bit, but am having trouble getting the face to look right on the 16x16 while maintaining pixel alignment. Would it be fine if I did half pixel steps for most of the facial features?

[achadwick]

@E-man-dev
It depends on what that does to the shapes when they get rendered. Sorry to be vague, but you need to test it out.

For a quick preview, try loading the 16px SVG into Krita (at 100DPI if it asks), and then zooming in.

With a 16x16 icon, what you want to avoid is everything merging into one horrible blur. It's often worth redoing very detailed shapes as Unions (Ctrl++) of tiny pixel-aligned rectangles hitting the entirety of their pixels and triangles that cover pixel halves. Literal pixel art, but done with vectors! Would this make a difference, or is it an eye spacing issue?

Feel free to attach an SVG here if you want me to have a look :)

[E-man-dev]

It's mainly an issue with the eyes and nose. The character is itself a pixel art in-game, but the face alone is more than 16 by 16 pixels in-game, so I have to get a bit creative with how to make the eyes and nose work. I will try the Krita test.

The nose is the biggest problem... as long as that looks okay, everything else I can work with. I will look later.
UPDATE: It should be fine!

[E-man-dev]

No blue element it is! Found it was easier to just make Sheepy take up the full 16 pixel height.
Fear not, the final version will obey the rules surrounding which elements are higher up in the layer stack, but it will be easier for me to scale the design before I start cutting into shapes.
UPDATE:

I have to call it a night, but here is the 32x32 before shadows. Should be the same as the 64x64 before shadows.

[E-man-dev]

@achadwick here is what all three main variants look like before shadows. Anything you want me to change? The proportions were difficult to keep consistent while maintaining pixel alignment, but they look good when pixelated and they are still all generally the same icon.

[achadwick]

(Just converting to draft while we bat ideas around in the discussion thread. I don't want to accidentally merge the 1st draft)

[achadwick]

@E-man-dev woah, thanks for the good work on this! It's looking really good. Let's go ahead with this design

I thought I'd turn the handle on making the 64, 48, and 24, and try to see how the shadows would work. What do you think of this approach? Zipped below for your convenience.

📎 sheepy.zip

I just pixel arted the 16 size's nose. Uniquely, it's not a T-shape, but I reckon that's OK at such an absurdly small size. Also note there are a lot of half-pixel sizes to the shapes that make up the character's face that are then aligned to the next pixel along. That's fine, since the character is looking slightly up and to its left. The rendered pixel blobs are now asymmetrical, but they have a good directionality, I think.

I've tried to retain the same place for the face "cutout" within the woolly head. It's not vectored as a cutout yet, because I want to retain the primitives for as long as needed. Is it cute recessed in, like an astronaut's helmet, or should the face as a whole protrude? The nose already does, eyes are flat paint to create a slight sense of depth. I'm asking because the game art tends to make the face protrude:

🔗 https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=sheepy+a+short+adventure&ia=images&iax=images

Going forward, we will have to break the primitive rectangles and ellipses down to plain paths because right now they have every transformation ever done on them in their history packed into a matrix transform each. They're visible in the XML view in Inkscape. Matrix transforms can actually upset some renderers quite radically, so we try to break things down to raw points and paths without transforms before merging. Sometimes that means a lot of object to path conversion, like it does for this one because the ears and legs are all rotated+translated+scaled copies of an original. I can take care of this bit for you once you're ready - it's just a technical finesse that I can do in a separate commit.

Will you be updating your branch with what you decide on? I hope you'll accept my changes to the face area especially 😁

[E-man-dev]

@achadwick thanks! I know I originally had the face popped out like in the official artwork, but I played around with changing the shadow to a highlight and now that the face is a little brighter it just doesn't look right with the face popped out.
The ones you made look pretty good! I'm not sure about the nose on the 32x32, but I don't know how else you would do it while keeping the facial features in the same place, and it seems fine once I actually zoom out to 100%. I will make the commit shortly.

[achadwick]

Looks good to go. I'm going to squash the changes into a single commit for neatness, which will also close out this PR. Thanks again so much for the fun, high quality icon! 🐏

I'll fix up the matrix transforms on the main branch shortly afterwards. I think that's all that's left.

[achadwick]

Fixed up the matrix transforms. Thanks again for the submission! 🎉

[E-man-dev]

@achadwick I just realized I forgot to update the Steam versions! The Steam versions are still the old one I first made!

[achadwick]

@E-man-dev What are you seeing? It looks like the main repo now has the following symlinks at all sizes.

• steam_icon_1568400.svg → sheepy-a-short-adventure.svg
• lutris_sheepy-a-short-adventure.svg → sheepy-a-short-adventure.svg

In other words, there isn't a separate steam or lutris version at my end, just an alias to the main iconset we've been working on.

If you make sure you're on the latest main "master" branch, you should see the stuff that actually gets installed in the main size apps folders, e.g. Papirus/64x64/apps. Usually it bubbles to the top if you sort by latest update first.

I checked, and 1568400 is the game's steam ID: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1568400/Sheepy_A_Short_Adventure/. It should work correctly like that, as I understand it. Also the lutris tag seems to be "sheepy-a-short-adventure"> https://lutris.net/games/sheepy-a-short-adventure/, so that looks right too.

Anyway, where are you seeing the old icons and what folder? Can you double check that it's happening, please? You may need do a full uninstall and reinstall of Papirus if you're using the installer scripts or "make install".

If I'm missing something, please do raise it as a bug so it's more visible. Go to https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/papirus-icon-theme/issues, click New Issue, click Bug Report and fill in the details.

[E-man-dev]

It appears I just forgot how it worked... it's been a while since I made the first version.