Icons Tool
The game has many hundreds of blox (user placeable objects that link together, we called Blox) and every one of them needed a player facing icon that could be neatly and efficiently organised into a menu. We decided to pack as many icons as we could into larger icon atlases. These are then used by a material in the UI system to display individual icons via icon index.
Creating these atlases would be no small task, and if blox are constantly changing or being updated it would be a never ending task. Instead I created this tool that takes in the real blox meshes that get used in game, and renders them to small 2D icons that get packed into the atlases automatically. This was meant to be a stop gap until the changes settled down and the icons could be hand drawn, but the quality and customisation of the output ended up being good enough to use as final icons for almost all blox.
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Junkster is an unreleased project from by Stormcloud Games. Currently stalled by lack of publisher but with some luck the product will release to the public, but as yet it is unknown when.
Wishlist on steam if you want to see it released: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1675860/Junkster/
Initial landing page of the tool. Most users would only need this first place, press the "Create Atlases" button and wait 30 seconds for the process to complete.
Icons tool running through all icons creating atlases. This would be the day to day usage of the tool for most people, as they create new blox or update which blox are in or out of the menu.
Breakdown of how the atlases are composed and previewed and used in-game.
Icon preview to prevent the need to run the game to see if an icon is working or not.
Material swapping and basic features description of the tool.
Tool data storage, settings and documentation.