Tutorial: Steam mod icon Last edited 2 years ago2022-12-20 14:58:10 UTC

So you've made some Half-Life mod. Maybe it's some fun singleplayer campaign, an obnoxious content replacement pack, or a class-based team multiplayer where you battle as Xen creatures. No matter what your mod is, the point is you want a nice little icon to show up next to its name in the Steam library and in the game window's title bar.

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There's only 3 files you need to worry about: game.tga, <iconname>_big.tga and liblist.gam.

game.tga	This is the icon that will be visible in the window's title bar. It may be anything from 16x16 to 48x48 pixels as far as I'm aware, but it must be a 24bit .tga.
<iconname>_big.tga	Despite what the "_big" part of the name implies, it must be 16x16 pixels. On the other hand, it's not limited to just 24bit .tga but may also be a .png file instead.

For liblist.gam you need to add the line

icon "<iconname>"

Make sure to replace <iconname> in liblist.gam and in the <iconname>_big.tga file's name to whatever you like. Some use the mod's name here, others simply use "game".

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It appears game.ico and <iconname>.tga are unused, at least in the Steam version of Half-Life.
None of the mentioned icon files appear to be used for the shortcut when pressing Add desktop shortcut in Steam.