New Steam Library Assets (Patreon)

So Valve is planning to update the layout and appearance of everyone's game library, which means all of us devs with a game(s) on Steam need to provide visual assets compatible with the new library. Reportedly for those games which don't manually do this Valve will try to automatically convert old assets based on what we've already got up there, but obviously games relying on that system aren't going to look as good since the formatting will be quite different. Lotsa devs gonna be spending time on this in the near term...

So anyway, this week I spent some time throwing together a few pieces that meet the new specifications, mostly just adjusting old assets, but ending up having to give them a bit of a new look given the requirements.

While just starting out opening all the relevant files I was fooling around with adding a drop shadow to the main title with a white background, and that actually looks pretty cool!

But no, I'm not actually using this.

For the main header image they'll be using, I just converted an excerpt from the main game screenshot I created a while ago:

It takes a long time to put together good assets (not to mention nothing's ever "finished," you can always be tweaking and improving here and there, or exploring new and better options...), and I've got other stuff to be busy with these days (seriously, kind of annoying to have Steam handing down more work to do xD), so I didn't want to spend a bunch of time working from scratch.

The title logo will be superimposed over that header image, off to the left, though it's semi-transparent and its position will by somewhat dynamic depending on the size of the window. In fact, even the amount of the header image shown will be dynamic.

I spent a bit more time on the new box art...

You may have seen before that I created some Cogmind box art for Twitch a while back that I rather liked and had started using in a few other places, basically just the Cogmind icon superimposed over a bunch of ASCII. That background was actually done by activating an Exp. Signal Interpreter and taking a screenshot of the animating effect across a map, then tweaking the colors and brightness.

But that wouldn't really do for official Steam box art, if only because they said they want the name of the game on it. So... more design to do. I went through a bunch of iterations, just exploring what different ideas looked like (all rough to just to get an idea):

And eventually here we have the final version:

One of the things to remember when building stuff like this is that it has to work at a lot of different sizes, especially small ones, so the challenge is getting something decent that scales well.

No idea when Steam is actually going to use these, but anyway they're now uploaded.