OAA Style Guide for Icons

Updated 2017-12-05

< Icons

Technical Stuff

Format and Size

Ability Icons are 128 x 128px. Item icons are 64 x 88px. Files should be saved as PNG with no compression.

Directories

In-game icons can be found in the following directories:

• ".../resource/flash3/images/items/custom/" - These are the icons that appear in inventory (the shop, courier, and player inventories)
• ".../resource/flash3/images/spellicons/custom/" - These are the icons that appear both in ability UI and in the buff/debuff HUD.

Concepts

New Items

Certain high-tier, vanilla Dota2 items are upgradeable into new items through various special items or "cores". At the time of writing, these include the Upgrade Cores, the Reflex Core, and the Farming Core. Given the huge array of possible upgrade paths, these new items always require a recipe.

Tiers

Typically, new items represent an item path containing multiple, related items of different tiers (eg. Satanic Core, Satanic Core 2, etc.) Each increase in tier requires cores that are more difficult to attain than the last. Tiers are numbered 1-5.

Design

Basic Guidelines

Items should comport with the Dota 2 icon style where possible. Icons of increasing tiers of items (eg. Heaven's Halberd 1-3) should build-off of the same basic source icon. This way, they appear very similar to each other whilst having simple "enhancements" at each increase of tier. Good enhancements often play-off of the innate style and purpose of the item (eg. giving a spiky item more spikes). Glance value is key.

Pips

Icons of increasing tiers of items should also have pips, or dots, in the upper-right-most corner. These pips communicate to the players both the max level and current level of the item. The total number of dots represents the max level. White dots represent current level. The pip template is available both in XCF and PNG format.