Lövely Character Creator

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xeol
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Lövely Character Creator

Post by xeol »

I am planning to create a RPG-ish game with a 3/4ths view, kinda like SNES-era RPGs, but I have one big problem: sprites. I wanna use original graphics, but I suck at pixel art.

I used to play around with RPG Maker when I was around 14, 15 years old, and there was a pretty nice software to create custom charsets (the "actors" sprites) called Charas.ex.

It is still available around the web, but its sprite format is quite obsolete, only 3 frames per animation and kinda small (24x32) sprites. I looked around for newer versions, but they were all buggy and limited to the default sprites of the new versions of RPG Maker.

So I decided to propose a collaborative project to the coolest and nicest game engine community I ever knew: you :awesome:

I made a simple application-thing (using Löve) to create sprites in a similar way as Charas.ex, overlaying separate sprites for clothes, hair, body, acessories and so. I made this in a few hours, and I kinda suck at coding too, so there is room for a LOT of improvements (things like color sliders would be very, very cool), but the most important part is the sprite database.

I would like to see it grow, so I (and other people around here and all over the internet) could use them to create semi-original graphics without having to draw everything from scratch.

I used 32x32 sprites with 4 different states (up, down, left and right) and 8 frames of animation for each state.
I haven't implemented a way to save your files because I'm using love 0.7.2 and the only format it supports is BMP (which sucks), but it's possible to take a screenshot of the complete spritesheet and edit it using other software.

Well, here it goes.

Use the arrow keys to navigate, the horizontal arrows change the "set" and the vertical arrows change the particular item used.

EDIT: Forgot the most important: to add sprites to the database, just paste them in the corresponding folder, under "gfx"
EDIT 2: also, don't feel constrained by the base model I created. It sucks. It would be nice to have a 'standardized' character model so all the sprites would fit one another, but the one I made is terrible.
Attachments
sample sprite
sample sprite
BASE-CHAR.png (2.82 KiB) Viewed 7309 times
LCC.love
(9.65 KiB) Downloaded 398 times
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MarekkPie
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Re: Lövely Character Creator

Post by MarekkPie »

That's pretty cool.
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pk
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Re: Lövely Character Creator

Post by pk »

That is cool.

I do pixel art for a hobby, and one thing I can tell you from experience, is that even for free stuff like this, you'll want to explicitly set a guideline for licensing. You'll probably want to use one of the Creative Commons license for all the base images.
ALL CREATURE WILL DIE AND ALL THE THINGS WILL BE BROKEN. THAT'S THE LAW OF SAMURAI.
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xeol
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Re: Lövely Character Creator

Post by xeol »

pk wrote:That is cool.

I do pixel art for a hobby, and one thing I can tell you from experience, is that even for free stuff like this, you'll want to explicitly set a guideline for licensing. You'll probably want to use one of the Creative Commons license for all the base images.

why exactly?
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Robin
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Re: Lövely Character Creator

Post by Robin »

So people can actually use the characters they create.
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coffee
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Re: Lövely Character Creator

Post by coffee »

This is a basic but very good feature and I love it.

Advice: Would be useful that the numbers/areas at top could be reached with respective key.

And please, use BMP at will for now. We can always too easily convert from bmp to png in some other program (and reintroduce transparency again).
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miko
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Re: Lövely Character Creator

Post by miko »

xeol wrote:I made a simple application-thing (using Löve) to create sprites in a similar way as Charas.ex, overlaying separate sprites for clothes, hair, body, acessories and so. I made this in a few hours, and I kinda suck at coding too, so there is room for a LOT of improvements (things like color sliders would be very, very cool), but the most important part is the sprite database.
Nice idea. Could you list the features which such tool must/should/could support? I have never used similar tools, so I am not sure what are expectations.
It would be nice to have an online sprite database integrated with the tool.
My lovely code lives at GitHub: http://github.com/miko/Love2d-samples
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kikito
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Re: Lövely Character Creator

Post by kikito »

This is a very good idea. Lately I've been working on a library that might work well with this. I hope I will announce it very soon!
When I write def I mean function.
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xeol
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Re: Lövely Character Creator

Post by xeol »

Today I'll be working on color sliders to change the color of individual items and a way to save the picture as BMP, expect updates later.

If any of you are pixel artists or know any pixel artists who could help with the database, I would appreciate any contribution.
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pk
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Re: Lövely Character Creator

Post by pk »

Robin wrote:
xeol wrote:why exactly?
So people can actually use the characters they create.
Exactly. As a programmer you generally don't want art you use from the internet to be in a state of copyright limbo. It's good to explicitly license any sort of collaborative community art. Take a look at this FAQ. It talks about some of the license options.

http://opengameart.org/content/faq
xeol wrote:If any of you are pixel artists or know any pixel artists who could help with the database, I would appreciate any contribution.
These are both high quality forums with lots of pixel artists. You can create an unpaid job offer and see if anyone is interested.
http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation ... opic=571.0
http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=671

There's always deviantART as well...
http://forum.deviantart.com/community/projects/#
ALL CREATURE WILL DIE AND ALL THE THINGS WILL BE BROKEN. THAT'S THE LAW OF SAMURAI.
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