Grouvee is an awesome community, I love making lists of my games that I have collected over the years and its small size makes its harder for me to get lost. I also love the badges that encourage community interaction, and the game completion badges. Unfortunately not every game has a badge. I have completed Thomas was Alone on Steam and there is no badge for that game. I also completed a TON of console games like Shadow of the Colossus and Zelda Majora’s Mask. I hope that there is a way to create more badges for most games out there so that the community is rightfully rewarded for putting extra effort in a game they love. What do you think? Should there be more badges for games out there including console games? I believe I am not the only one that thinks so.
Largely the issue is time and ability. The existing badges were all made by one person, in her spare time (@peter can correct me if there were more than one working on them, but I believe I’m correct). That’s really the limiting factor to the number of badges. It’s a lot of work for one person and we are pretty fortunate to have what we do. That’s not to say that more badges aren’t welcome. I wish I had better illustration skills, I’d be happy to contribute new badges. Maybe someone else in the Grouvee community has the time and ability to contribute some new badge illustrations.
@Jess made every one of these badges from scratch. She’s quite good. She’s been pretty busy recently, but she might be back around more here in the near future. I’d love some more badges because I think it’s an awesome idea. If I had to draw them, they’d just be stick figures 
I will say, if you want console games, you might have to talk someone else into making those. Jess sticks to PC stuff.
I like having threads on each game, which is a nice side effect of the badges.
If it’s a simple matter of just making the art, i’ll work on contributing a few time to time of the ones I really like or left memorable experiences
I took a look at Jess badges and tried to keep consistent style so will look nice side to side. 100x100 or 100x65 seems good, alpha, etc PNG under 12K. What else is involved (technically)? Just the hand drawn bits? (A lot of games you can get away with very little) please let me know as i would like to make a few, starting with skyrim and morrowind (at the the least) . Also if people make their own badges like this (a good idea i think) what would the protocol be for sending them into the site/starting threads on them? Each user creates their own thread and admin somehow uses the assets/artwork? Thanks.It could play out nicely and be a good way to get discussion going,
Thank you so much! I would also contribute, as I am an artist myself but I am unfortunately busy with school at the moment and digital drawing takes me more time than i would like.
Also to any willing to create badges I recommend making badges based on Grouvee’s Most Popular and Top 250 Games. Make sure to get the “big hit” and newer games first ex. Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy XV respectively.
Yeah, 100x100 is what she made them. We have a Staff thread where she would post the images, and then there’s some other magic that goes on to create and trigger the badges, but I can do all that real easily if the image is created.
This thread seems fine to me to post in with the image, what game it’s for, and the name of the badge. I don’t want to have too many threads under this category since it could make finding the games a little harder. I might have to think of a way to organize them anyway.
I’m still rather busy at the moment, but I feel like I should respond to this thread before anyone puts in any work.
If more people are brought in to make badges, I’d rather it not be a just ‘whoever wants to make them’. If we do that, then everyone is going to want to make a badge for their favorite game and be done. We’ll also run into the problems of people possibly stealing art.
There’s a thread for people to request game badges, which is what i was working off of past the first batch, which I just made of generally ‘popular’ games. Anyone who joined on would need to work from this list, not just make badges for the games they wanted badges for (if I did this, the only badges we would have would be for a bunch of obscure indie titles no one had ever heard of. And @Peter I made you those Persona badges, didn’t I? That’s a console game! 
).
Before I was side-lined by life, I was in the process of making the badges more uniform, so they’re all going to be changing. I’d like to finish that before anyone starts making some, so they can all have a similar look. I also thought I’d already made a Morrowind and Skyrim badge, but it seems I just never uploaded them. So I’ve got those done already, along with about 8 others.
The badge images themselves are actually pretty enormous. I did this so I could possibly use the art for profile background images in the future, so people could spiff up their profiles. That project is a little ways off, but I’m ready for it with the art in place already. Actually some of the badges have a lot more detail that you don’t see after they’ve been shrunk down so much.
In the end, the badges actually don’t take me too long to do. The biggest issue I face is not being familiar with the games (especially console only games), which is why I asked on the request thread for people to point out some imagery that would represent the game that I could use (that wasn’t spoilery). Unfortunately no one really responded, so it didn’t seem like anyone was too interested in the badges.
As Peter said, I’ll be back soon (and back to making badges), I’ll be trying to put out a batch on a regular schedule. If people are really interested again, we could even get a poll going for which ones are most wanted.
I’ll get started back up again, with the overhauled badges, and we’ll see where we go from there. I’m not against other people joining in on it, I have some ideas on how to handle it, but it may not be necessary just yet. I was working under some serious time constraints before and will have a lot more free time now.
I think this might be what we should focus on again, given everything you’ve said. Perhaps everyone who has expressed interest in additional badges can contribute some image ideas rather than their own artwork, that way allowing you to create additional badges that fit the uniform style. That makes sense to me and will keep the aesthetic consistent. I enjoy the style of the existing badges and would like to see that style remain.
Also a great idea. I second that.
If the time comes that it is necessary, or at least helpful, maybe a style guide would need to be drafted. But that can be left up to discussion another day.
Sorry for putting pressure on you Jess, I just really think the badges are an awesome addition to the site and they all look lovely. I understand that if we get artists willing to provide badges we have to create an organized system in order to avoid people oversaturating the community with inconsistent looking badges and, of course- stealing of artwork. I think you should pick people you trust, artists whose work you admire and work well with. Maybe you could assemble a small team of people helping you to create badges. Also for badges from games you’re not familiar with I’d recommend the desktop icon of the game as a fast reference. As for console games, you can ask me or anyone else really, I and many others here have knowledge on many games (As you can see my game collection is fairly large). A little research can REALLY help. Just looking at imagery from a game can give you plenty of ideas. Anyway, I think your badges are awesome and would be happy to help you if you want.
No pressure, the timing is pretty spot on honestly, a month ago I wouldn’t have been able to scrape together 2 minutes to work on this stuff, but now I’ve got the time and I’m eager to get back into it. Plus I could use the distraction.
Currently when faced with a game I’m not familiar with I just pop it into google and go into images, it works most of the time, there will be some imagery that pops up over and over again, but every so often, there will be absolutely nothing. Desktop icons are a good idea, but when it comes to PC games, I’m usually pretty okay (especially if it’s an indie title), it’s normally just the console games. Like you, I’m sitting on a decent sized collection tallying in somewhere over 5,000 games. But they’re only PC games. My games knowledge pretty much only goes NES, SNES, then PC. Xbox or PS AAA exclusives you could probably safely bet I’ve probably not even heard of.
Thanks for the offer of help. I might set up a thread for it, that could be the easiest thing to do. As soon as I get the badges overhauled I’ll start looking into all this other stuff, like polls.
Cool sounds great! (5000 games!? 
Where do you find the time to play them!?). I’ll be sure to visit the thread and polls. Thanks for taking the time to reply to my thread, its great to see leaders actively participating in the community they created, especially when it seems that the community is very small and not very active. And it’s also great to meet another artist who’s interested in video games. 