While D-Pad Studios’ Owlboy is an almost universally-acclaimed indie darling (albeit one that came with a decade of development and delays), there is one thing that upcoming Nintendo Switch purchasers don’t love: the icon. Seen in the image below (and the normal Reddit hemming and hawing), the icon is admittedly ugly. With this in mind, developer D-Pad Studios already has a quick explanation and fix in the works.
Finding out what is wrong with the Owlboy icon is short and simple work. The icon is a pixelized close-up of the titular Owlboy, set to a plain white backdrop, and (most visually unpleasant) noticeably off-center. What is even more jarring about the icon is the fact that Owlboy has some of the best pixel art to come out in the past few years, with almost unprecedented style and detail.
Thankfully, D-Pad Studios never intended for that to be the actual icon for their game, and it seems to be an administrative mix up. Instead, D-Pad’s creator Simon Anderson explained the problem in a tweet:
https://t.co/3fqAsK9oUR
In case you were curious: This was the intended Switch home screen icon we prepped ages ago. We're still figuring out what happened, but the temp icon won't be there for long. pic.twitter.com/svA6vAWaKt— Simon S. Andersen (@snakepixel) February 2, 2018
As well as an official statement on the developer’s official Twitter profile:
Our not so artistic Boguins got a hold of the icon maker for Owlboy, Asio was not amused. We will have the intended icon up and running soon. Thank you for your patience! pic.twitter.com/IwgeZU1umu
— D-Pad Studio (@DPadStudio) February 2, 2018
Obviously the new icon is objectively better, brimming with color and higher-quality art. Or, at the very least, no close-ups on pixels.
Thanks to the large real-estate on Nintendo Switch’s UI for the game icons, the Nintendo fanbase tends to me more proactive about the digital art. In fact, there have been developer-efforts to get early-publicity with votes on what the Nintendo Switch icon should be.
For those out of the loop, Owlboy is a puzzle-platformer that began development sometime in 2017. The game formally released in 2016 exclusively on PC, but is coming to Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox One on February 13, 2018. In case you want to know more about the game, feel free to check out the DualShockers review.