Useful External Resources

These are resources, available on the web, that might supplement, or aid, with game design when working with protograf.

Note

Inclusion of these resources does not constitute a recommendation! As always, check how they are allowed to be used and any terms and conditions.

Contents

• Prototyping Tools

• Icons, Art and Images

• Card Suit Icons

• BoardGameGeek

• Unicode Characters

• Miscellaneous

Prototyping Tools

• https://www.ttgda.org/software-tools - lists a number of tools that can be used for game design

• https://github.com/christianbachmann/board-game-design-canvas - an outline for a game development process that can help choose what you need to prototype

Hint

Please also refer to the tool lists/guides for hexagonal grid resources, playing cards resources, as well as card/deck box resources.

Icons, Art and Images

As far as possible, this excludes AI-generated art or icons; if you see any listed, please create an issue on this program’s GitHub website.

• https://openclipart.org/

• https://www.svgrepo.com/

• https://game-icons.net/

• https://icon-sets.iconify.design/ (check license and attribution)

• https://publicdomainicons.firebaseapp.com/icons

• https://publicdomainreview.org/collections/

• https://creazilla.com/

• https://www.irasutoya.com/

• https://www.si.edu/openaccess

• https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/

• https://bioart.niaid.nih.gov/ - medical, biological, animal and “various” in PNG and SVG formats

• https://thenounproject.com/ (some free, provided they are attributed)

• https://developers.google.com/fonts/docs/material_icons - downloadable set of free-to-use small icons in PNG/SVG format

• https://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprints/ - outlines and drawings of military and other equipment and objects… plus a skull or two

• https://www.deviantart.com/sharandra/gallery/38764181/stock-textures - images that can be used to fill in background areas (check license and attribution)

Map Art and Icons

• A collation of on-line procedural generators, with multiple configuration options that can generate detailed PNG files; free to use in any way, but please do give credit!

  • https://watabou.itch.io/village-generator - for example, disable fields, buildings, roads and relief to just show the trees

  • https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

  • https://watabou.itch.io/perilous-shores

(Bonus: https://watabou.github.io/realm_styles.html can be used for the above to set themes and drawing styles)

Card Suit Icons

• Playing Cards - the section has a table showing a number of symbols linked to image files: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card#Modern_formats

• New Suit Icons - https://boardgamegeek.com/image/7928106/bmorayta1

Unicode Characters

There are thousands of symbols that are potentially of use in a prototype design.

For game design, the character sets from U+2000 (General Punctuation) to U+2BFF (Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows) are likely to be of interest.

• https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/plane/U+0000

• https://www.w3schools.com/charsets/ref_html_utf8.asp

• https://www.codetable.net/groups

• https://www.unicode.org/charts/ - PDF versions of symbol groups

• https://shapecatcher.com/unicodefonts.html (free fonts supporting Unicode)

Note

Not all Unicode characters can be displayed in all fonts!

BoardGameGeek

The Board Game Geek website has many communities and lists of resources to help support aspiring game designers; one place to start is https://boardgamegeek.com/forum/974616/bgg/board-game-creation

Miscellaneous

• https://legibility.info/contrast-calculator - calculating and testing easily accessible colour combinations for screen and print

• https://cur.by/styleguide - how to write your rulebook!