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 sections on hexagonal grid resources as well as playing cards resources.

Icons, Art and Images

• 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://creazilla.com/

• https://www.irasutoya.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)

There is a collated list of sites with free artwork at https://www.fairway3games.com/where-do-i-get-art-for-free-an-ongoing-list/ (if this site is down, check the archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20220330035328/https://www.fairway3games.com/where-do-i-get-art-for-free-an-ongoing-list/)

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!