What does loyalty look like?

September 1, 2005 • 2 min read


This an old status update on my web-based game Engineering Faith.

One of the most important aspects of Faith is your followers’ Properties. These describe what your followers are like - are they healthy, militant, or fiercely loyal? Are they lazy, greedy, or just plain annoying? A lot of the game is centered around these things how you can affect them.

One of the things I’m currently working on is an icon to represent each one of these ten things. I want the icons to be more sensible than they were in Asylum (Integrity anybody?), but it’s hard. Wtf does loyalty look like? Oh hey, look, there’s some loyalty. Not so much.

I have somewhat sensible icons for most of the properties now, but I think Loyalty is the hardest (Animosity and Holiness are also particularly difficult). Chris jokingly suggested a dog - dogs being loyal animals. I laughed, then cried, then tried it.

Unfortunately, as you can see from the image at right, it’s hard to convey a dog (or anything!) at the tiny size I need for icons in a web-based game. It looks okay big though. That is, if you want an icon to measure how much your followers like terriers. I also have all the icons in cool-looking circles, which looks cool but makes the available space even smaller. But really - even if it did look good small, who’s going to remember that a tiny dog-esque (one of the esteemed testers thought it looked like a cow) blob means “loyalty”?

So, if you have any thoughts on what would better represent loyalty than a dog, I’m all ears. I’m more of a cat person anyway, but most cats aren’t even slightly loyal. Nor are cows, for that matter.


Liked this? Follow along to see what's next.

© Allen Pike. 👋🏼 You can contact me, or check out Steamclock.