Open EchoControl with the Commandos 2 profile. Now open it with Elite Dangerous. They look like two completely different programs at a glance: different background, different icon, different style. None of it comes from a shared template — every game gets its own look, made for that game and no other.
Why we don't use one design for every game
The easy option would have been one flat design for every game: the same gray box, the same icon, with only the command list changing underneath. That would have meant a single template file, zero art work per game, and a new profile shipped in an afternoon instead of a week.
We tried it first. The moment we saw it next to real gameplay, it felt out of place. A player with Elite Dangerous open full-screen, with its own spaceship-and-space look, and on top of it a generic gray panel that could belong to any other program. A flat, generic panel makes the tool feel stuck on top, not part of the game. Art that follows the game's own style, on the other hand, feels like it belongs.
There's exactly one screen where the opposite turned out to be true, and the plain version won there after six redesigns — the difference is whether you're looking at that screen for two seconds or for a whole session.
So every profile gets real work put into it. The background comes from the game itself, or copies its style. The icon is cropped and centered on the game's characters or world — never a stock image dropped in as-is. For Shadow Tactics, we first tried a generic ninja background, the kind you'd find in any image search. It looked fine on its own, and wrong next to the real game: Shadow Tactics has a very specific palette, almost like ink on paper, and the generic background fought against it instead of matching it.
Two games can share one look, but only on purpose.
Delta Force and Delta Force: Hawk Ops run on the same engine and share a military look, so there we do let them share a background and icon. That was a clear choice, not a shortcut — sharing art only makes sense when two games actually look and feel the same.
The day we put the wrong icon on both games
Sharing art between the two Delta Force games is fine. Sharing the wrong art isn't. And that's exactly what happened once.
An icon update was meant only for Hawk Ops — a soldier portrait made for that game specifically. Instead, it got applied to both Delta Force games. The cause was small and boring at the same time: when copying the update files, the deploy script points to a folder shared between both games, and this one time the new file got left there without the "this is Hawk Ops only" check that's normally done by hand.
We found the mistake the same day and fixed it before anyone downloaded it. It was a small error, but a useful one. From the outside, "these two games share a look on purpose" and "these two games got the same picture by mistake" look exactly the same — until you notice something's off. We noticed because someone on the team, who knows both games by heart, opened regular Delta Force and it looked wrong to see an icon they recognized from somewhere else.
A few small rules we follow now to get each game's look right:
- Icons are always cropped to the same fixed size, centered on a face or another clear detail. We never just resize whatever image we already have lying around.
- Large files get compressed before shipping. One Elite Dangerous icon went from almost 6MB to under 1MB, with no drop in quality — just a better export.
- When two games do share art, we write down why. That way, the next update doesn't accidentally undo that decision and repeat the same mistake.
What's left of all this
None of this changes how the voice commands work. It's a detail nobody writes to us about. But it's also part of why EchoControl feels made for the game you're playing, not just placed on top of it.
Next time you open two profiles back to back and it strikes you how different they look, now you know: it's not luck, it's work. And once, for a few hours, it was also a mistake we caught in time.
See how EchoControl looks in your own game.