itch.io

Thanks!

Yes, it is!

You can define your own sprite style, full with your own art, animations, layers. You can define literally everything that comprises the sprite style yourself.

Please consult the sprite style development guide and this tutorial video for help getting started. If you want additional help or guidance, feel free to email me at jordanbunkework@gmail.com and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

If you want more tightly packed sprite sheets, you can crop your frames by inputting negative values in the “Padding” section of the configuration screen. In that case, frames will not be 48x48, but that shouldn’t matter.

This sprite style contains elements that are the copyright of The Pokémon Company, so no.

Does it bring up the file dialog at all before it crashes?

If you are able to, please record your screen when you press (+) and the program crashes and send me the video to jordanbunkework@gmail.com.

Also, if you have a GitHub account, you can report a bug and we can move this conversation there. That will be the best place for anyone else who has this issue to find more information. If not, we can correspond here or via email.

Which operating system are you running on your computer?

Same!

Can you remind me what the sprite sheet layout that Pokémon Essentials expects is?

Hi, thanks for reaching out.

You can request specific clothing/armour additions in the Addition requests thread.

In terms of editing your own characters with custom clothing, yes, that is possible. You cannot draw new clothing options directly within Top Down Sprite Maker, but you can edit the contents of the sprite style ZIP and modify the sprite style in any way you see fit, including adding clothing assets. I have published a sprite style development guide and made a tutorial video to help you do just that.

Please let me know if you have any other questions :)

I think you’ll be happy with the script error reporting improvements if you’re still interested in making/editing sprite styles!

Thanks! Nice to hear from you again :)

It would be great to have a feature where we can upload multiple cover images for a particular project and test which gets a higher click-through rate. This would be similar to features YouTube has for A/B testing video titles and thumbnails.

Okay, noted. I’ve gotten similar feedback on Reddit.

Hi.

I think I understand the problem. To use the Time Elements sprite style with my program, you have to use the Time Elements download file that ends with _tdsm.zip, which I think is only available with the Itch.io version of Time Elements, not Steam.

I think your best course of action is contacting finalbossblues, showing him that you bought Time Elements on Steam, and having him give you a download key for the Itch.io version of his asset pack. That way, you will be able to download the version of Time Elements that you can use with my program.

I hope that clears up the issue. Sorry for the confusion. If you have any other issues with TDSM, feel free to email me at jordanbunkework@gmail.com.

Also, I am in the process of releasing TDSM on Steam. I will post a devlog once I have a release date.

Nope, I haven’t heard anything.

Thank you!

Yes, the full list of approved sprite styles, which have either been made by me or have been confirmed as compatible with the program, can be found here.

I am actively working on adding more content to some of these, adding more sprite styles, and collaborating with pixel artists to support their asset packs as TDSM sprite styles.

Right, okay. That basically confirms all my suspicions.

Thanks for your input!

Hi, I’m sorry you feel that way.

Yes, the character pack is a separate purchase. You’d basically be paying for the convenience of getting 450 character sprite sheets at once. It’s obviously possible to customize and export all the characters in the asset pack by using the sprite style in TDSM, but the asset pack saves you many hours of customizing and exporting.

The character pack is meant for people that want a large pool of potential NPCs to choose from to populate their projects. They may not even be interested in TDSM as a program.

No worries! I’ve sent you a reply to my initial email, so hopefully you should be able to find it now.

If you aren’t able to, you can email me at jordanbunkework@gmail.com and I will re-send the proposal in a reply.

Happy New Year!

Which version of TDSM are you running?

And are you pressing the plus or the curly braces to upload the sprite style?

Please also lmk what operating system you are using on your computer and any other relevant information that might help me figure out what’s going wrong :)

I haven’t heard back from her yet

Please post general comments about Pixel Citizen here.

For advanced guides, like how to edit the sprite style, see here. To request new content to be added to the sprite style, post here.

Hi, thanks for your question. Sorry for the late response.

Yes, you are missing something. The default sprite style that the program launches with is only a placeholder.

You can buy/download sprite styles online. All of the sprite styles featured in promotional materials on this store page are free downloads. You can find a complete list of available sprite styles here.

Let me know if that answers your question!

Editing the sprite style

TODO

If you run into any issues or simply have questions, please reply to this post.

Post any addition requests here. This can be one of the following types of additions:

• Animation
• Item of clothing
• Customization layer
• Hairstyle (front, back, facial)

I have Google Analytics set up for my tool, Top Down Sprite Maker. When I analyze the data, I see that I receive the second-most traffic from Brazil, right behind the US. However, based on the country codes associated with the IP addresses of every purchase, Brazil comprises a disproportionately low percentage of purchases.

I’ve come up with three reasons for this discrepancy:

1. Developing economy

On average, people in Brazil have less spending power than people in G7 countries like the US, Germany, the UK, Canada, etc. My program costs $10. This is a non-trivial amount of money that could alienate some potential buyers, especially in a country with a relatively weaker economy per capita.

2. Language barrier

Brazilians are less likely to speak/read English compared to people in high-income non-English-speaking countries like Germany. However, considering the accessibility of browser auto-translate features, I don’t see this being a significant issue.

3. Lack of Pix support

Most online transactions in Brazil are done via Pix, which is a payment system that was launched by the Central Bank of Brazil five years ago. Based on my research, it’s very uncommon for people in Brazil to pay for something online using PayPal or Stripe. I suspect that a lack of Pix support is a contributing factor to breaking the sales funnel.

What I’m asking

Here’s what I’d like to know:

• Can anyone living in Brazil provide their insights into these observations?
• Are there any other creators or developers who have made similar observations or have had similar experiences?
• Is it possible and feasible for Itch to support more payment processors such as Pix in the near future?

Cheers

Posters in the ongoing discussion threads [1] [2] about this issue have been consistently ignored by moderators/staff for almost two months as the issue continues to persist though… Some sort of update or explanation or even acknowledgement of the ongoing issue would go a long way to help us plan and manage our expectations.

Hi,

I would recommend either Stipple Effect, which is my own pixel art editor, or Aseprite.

Hi,

Yes, I plan to add them eventually but I have a few higher priority to-do items, including…

• Releasing a sprite style of original art
• Releasing TDSM on Steam
• v1.3.0 update

And yes, purchasing the program gives you access to all future software updates for TDSM. However, please note that purchasing the program does not grant you automatic access to support content like premium sprite styles.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Hi,

Just overworld sprites!

It would be quite difficult to do battle sprites with a paper doll system because of all of the different poses and body types/sizes.

From Emerald:

What operating system are you running?

Does the software work as expected otherwise?

If you can, please email me the .stip export you are trying to open in Stipple Effect at jordanbunkework@gmail.com.

As of v1.2.0, only compile-time and runtime errors have detailed error messages that pop up in the program. This is something I will address in the next major version.

If you want, I can help you debug your new ZIP if you email it to me at jordanbunkework@gmail.com.

TDSM itself does not impose any licensing restrictions on the use of art created in the program, but individual sprite styles may.

TDSM doesn’t come with the Pokémon sprite styles by default. They are separate free downloads. [Gen. III] [Gen. IV]

The Pokémon sprite styles are adapted from art that is the copyright of The Pokémon Company, so you should avoid using them for commercial projects.

There are sprite styles available for TDSM that do not have any licensing restrictions, like Time Elements and Puny Characters. I am also working on a sprite style with original art that will be out in a few days:

Great, I love someone that is willing to get their hands dirty hahaha!

The presence/absence of a color picker for a color selection is determined by the boolean argument in the color selection constructor $Init::col_sel. If you unzip the sprite styles and look into manifest.tds, search for occurrences of “$Init.col_sel(” to find all the color selection constructors. The ones defined to NOT have color pickers will have a false argument. Set this to true and they will have a color picker.

I don’t exactly remember how every single color replacement is defined off the top of my head, but for Puny Characters, for example, it actually performs color replacements by loading image files from the palettes subdirectory and sampling pixels at certain coordinates of that image. The color choice is represented by rows, and the specific color in the ramp (highlights, neutral, shadow) is represented by the column. Because of this implementation choice, adding a color picker won’t produce the desired effect and may lead to runtime errors/crashes. In that particular case, you would have to rewrite all of the color replacement logic to make it work with the color picker.

The general rule of thumb I used to adapt sprite styles for collaborations like Time Elements and Puny Characters is that if the artists were intentional about color palettes, I define color replacement logic and color selections in an enumerable way. You would have to write custom replacement logic for skin tone for Time Elements as well, for example.

Feel free to check out the sprite style development guide or read through the API specification for a better understanding of the theory. I can give you more detailed one-on-one help if you email me at jordanbunkework@gmail.com.

And thank you so much!

I’m working on bringing TDSM to Steam. It will probably be available sometime in late November.

Can you tell me your computer specs? What operating system are you running?

You can email me at jordanbunkework@gmail.com for support.

Happy to help! Appreciate the kind words :)

You have to upload the sprite style ZIP to TDSM before attempting to load a metadata JSON in that sprite style back into the program. The next update will add an error screen that catches it if it can’t match the JSON to an uploaded sprite style, but right now the program just crashes when that happens.

So every time you launch TDSM, you have to upload your modified Time Elements sprite style ZIP before you try to load from JSON .

Let me know if that makes sense and if it resolves your issue!

Edit: Just to clarify, you are supposed to use the JSON from the exported animation. That isn’t a mistake.

Hi, I appreciate your interest in the program!

TDSM itself does not impose any licensing restrictions on the use of art created in the program, but individual sprite styles may.

In this case, the art assets that comprise the Pokémon sprite styles are adapted from art that is the copyright of The Pokémon Company.

I have a partial solution:

Store your animated GIFs in a public GitHub repository and link the raw content URL in the HTML/Markdown with an <img> tag (HTML) or a ![]() (Markdown).

Here’s an example:

• Image link: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jbunke/tdsm-art/refs/heads/master/_tdsm/logo/itch/tdsm-itch-card-3-mini.gif
• Repository: jbunke/tdsm-art

This works for GIFs in project page and devlog bodies, but it doesn’t work for banners or background images, since those have to be uploaded via the theme editor, and thus they rely on Itch.io to be animated and rendered correctly.