Hi, just another comment! When the update comes to let us add custom parts, would we be allowed to share them here? I've already started working on a snake tail base body and a bunch of skintone recolours. I'd be happy to post them here if anyone needed them. I'm having so much fun playing around with the editor I'd love to spread the hype~!
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Absolutely! :D And the update is already live, just download the latest version and you will see that there is now an “assets” folder together with the tool. Just place your stuff there and it will show up once you reload the tool. If you need further instructions, check out the NEWASSETS.txt file included on the zip! Since new body shapes can’t be added - yet - add the snaketail body as a skin instead, similar to what I have done with the catfolk and the werewolves.
Oh that's what I meant, I'm making it a skin! Haha I wouldn't categorize being a snake as a new gender. Gotta add that I appreciate a lot that the engine calls them Shapes and you can mix and match any one with any gendered parts like facial hair and dresses. That's so awesome!
I'm enjoying the update so far but realizing oops the stuff I already started making had the wrong format! I didn't realise you needed to make the sprites without outlines. Do I have to make a separate outline file and put it somewhere? Or will the engine automatically create them? Should I take all the outlines off my files and then it'd work?
Oh darn! I'd also started making some fantasy skintone ideas, but it seems every Skin needs to have a full duplicate file structure of every clothing part for the Face file. I think I'll avoid making too many Skins then if it means the file size would balloon hugely for each one.
A possible suggestion for the future, maybe it'd be possible to organise Skins by "category"? For example all human ones could share the same outfit parts with no changes. Cos it seems only Eyes, Mouths and Brows have differences between human skin 00, 01 and 02. Then the cats have different hats, so they'd share skin category 2, and have one set of all the clothing between them, and so on. But I don't know if it's possible in the programming to set different parts to share different folders like that?
In any case, I'll just focus on my snake tails and make them for the three human skin colours for now. Hooray!
Oh yeah, the skins, you also brought to my mind that I completely forgot how to write proper instructions for those. And you are right, every skin requires a whole new copy of the file structure. I really need a more lean approach to that or things will grow exponentially - which will, in turn, use a lot of RAM to load all the files at once. The main issue is how I am building the paths so I can keep everything working in a similar way for all options. Your suggestion would work but, at the same time, it will limit the variety one can add to the tool since it becomes “hardcoded” in a way. I will tinker a bit with it and see how I can clean it up. Maybe an auxiliary text file giving instructions to what matches whit what - directory wise.
ANd keep at it, mate! I am really happy how much you are enjoying this tool and your feedback, I can see there is a lot of room for improvement. Thank you so much!
It's understandable! I thought that my suggestion probably would be short-sighted, as I don't know much about programming. I'll just tone down the scope for my snake tail set for now, and I can always add extra colours in future if things change. Currently got 4 of them and I hope I can finish it this week! I wanna modify the Bottoms into things a snake can wear instead of just telling people "don't use that option" haha. And gonna swap the cat and dog tails for different pattern snake tails cos they don't overlay right. But it's a little time consuming. Also including some faces and mouths as a bonus~!
Oh a quick extra question! Do the parts all have to keep the same naming scheme as the default ones? For example would my snake Skins have to be Skin07 etc, and eyes be Eyes19 etc? Or could I name them SkinSnake00 or something? Was just thinking cos naturally I'm naming them the number after what's there in the base pack, but if someone else made their same assets they'd probably also call it that, and it'd require a bunch of renaming to use both.
Ah, tell me about it, adding new clothes for multiple shapes can be a bit….nightmarish. You have no idea how long it took me to adapt everything on the facesets for every different shape/skin. But I believe it was worthwhile!
For patterns the only thing that is strict about naming are the skins - I noticed that I completely forgot to add that on the documentation, thanks again for the headsup - so they should follow the naming convention:
shape##_skin##.png (charsets directory)
skin##.png (facesets directory)
This way the engine knows what shape refers to what skin and how to build the proper path for the facesets. Since we are dealing with just 2 shapes for now, you will have both shape00_skin07.png as well as shape01_skin07.png. Then your facesets directory will have under both shape00 and shape01 a folder named skin07 with skin07.png inside of it following all the clothes that match this combination of shape and skin.
Asides from that all that is required is that the files - let’s say, breastplate.png - should have the same name across all folders, so the tool know what .png to point at.
EDIT: Oh yeah, if anything goes wrong, the tiny terminal/console on the tool will tell you which file is missing.
Thank you so much, this should help a lot! So just to confirm, the Skins have to still be Skin and nothing but a number afterwards? I couldn't hypothetically have Skin19S or something? But I could put Snake on the pngs of other parts to make it clearer they're part of this set?
I'm also having a little bit of difficulty doing the extra frames for the 6 frame version. Is there a particular rule you had when deciding what parts to get wider, to do that bouncy effect? Was just wondering cos the head seems to get bigger but the arms stay the same, so idk if i should have a wider tail or keep it the same, if contrast with the head is what was intended. It's a very unique vibe and I wouldn't want my sprites to look out of place with the style.
Edit: oh and do we need to have the same amount of pngs for each skin? Cos I noticed the catfolk have 16 eyes and humans have 18. But every other category is always the same size.
I like that you see what I did there. I didn’t want to slap it as genders, instead I went for shapes as a broader and more neutral approach instead of the male/female dicotomy, so you can mix whatever you want. There are also no gender based clothing, just slap whatever you want on any character.
As for the outline, the engine will create them automatically! Ideally leave without it, but if you want the engine to properly replace your outline - when the option “Tiny RPG Outline” is on - use #131549 as the colour for it! What I do is run 3 shaders when the option is on: one to remove all #131549, one to add #131549 but without rough corners, then I add ##f7eddc to the faceset only and with corners.
I am glad that you felt included, that was the first thing I thought about, being lax about gendering pixel art and letting people decide what their characters are and how they look.
Ah, the coding ain’t even that complex buuuut being so long since I have programmed everything came out a bit janky, so every iteration I try to improve things, clean up code and optimize where I can.
Thank you once again, my friend! :)