SubCritical App Icons

This was a set of application icons I created for an open source project called SubCritical, and its suite of associated documents.

Posted in Blog || Originally created on 2009-02-07 19:03:21 || Posted on 2010-02-06 13:40:22

This was a set of application icons I created for an open source application called SubCritical, and its suite of documents. At the time, SubCritical was being developed by a friend, Solra Bizna. Solra had asked me to base a lot of the icons on the shape of the logo of the popular realtime scripting language Lua, due to the program's heavy dependence on the language. He had also asked that I make the application icon itself look something like a container of sorts.

I took the approach of making everything look radioactive in at least one way or another, due to the project's name: "SubCritical". In this context, the word "SubCritical" has the meaning of "An amount of fissile material less than what would be needed for a sustained nuclear chain reaction.". As a result, I designed everything to look something like radioactive elements and nuclear fuel containers. Not that I've ever seen a nuclear fuel container in person before, but I thought this was a decent representation.

Here is a description of the project from its source-forge page:

"SubCritical is a 2D "game engine" that allows one to write cross-platform 2D games using version 5.1 of the Lua programming language. It has a fairly low footprint, low system requirements, and extremely overkill (i.e. gorgeous) text rendering support. It also does proper gamma-corrected blending, and has some "vector graphics" support.

SubCritical is actually intended as a trial run for a much more advanced game engine. It has thus been designed largely through "design by implementation," as well as choosing deliberate simplicity at the cost of some versatility. In spite of this, it has turned out to be a very powerful, very capable engine.

SubCritical is not a "game making program." Actual Lua programming is required in order to make a game. Additionally, almost no actual game logic is present in SubCritical; it is intended as a large set of support functions and utilities on top of which game logic can be implemented."