MAKING NEW PD ITEMS TUTORIAL

[Baron]

This is a really old tutorial, the main points that are still valid is actually drawing the item in photoshop. Everything thing before thatabout lines and location has been changed thanks to me finding a workign items template.

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Tutorial requires :
A brain.
A working copy of adobe photshop (or at least an image editing program which can deal with layers, you could do it with paint but damn, gonna be long and hard)

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Ok, first thing you must do fora successful paperdolling system to work is to decide on the sprite that players will use. For the system to work best all your players should have the same SIZE sprite.

Feel free to make one sprite, then just draw in a bunch of different details and recolour it until you're happy with it. These will form your base sprites for each of the classes in your game.

Regarding sprites


This image demonstrates what each frame of a sprite line does, and as such any paperdollitems must be drawn with the shape of the sprite in mind.

Next up is understanding how the paperdolling system calls items. The top line of the items.bmp holds all your paperdolled items running across horizontally.

YOU MUST CHOOSE ITEMS FROM THIS TOP LINE TO PAPERDOLL

Each 32X32 pixel box here represents a line of 12 tiles below in the item palette.


This image shows just how this works. Today we will be drawing the orange item.

Once you've decided and drawn your base sprite for all players, copy and paste it onto a new layer in adobe (the program will do this automatically).

I personally prefer to use slightly smaller sprites, because then you can draw armor and weapons that look much bigger then if you use a full size sprite.

So, pasted onto a new layer looks like….


that.

Now we have our sprite in, lets draw ourselves a new…. torch. So the orange item will be a torch. Create a new layer especially for the torch images.

----FACING UP----

Zoom in to the sprite you're working on. Because a torch would usually be held in the right hand, and out across the body very little of the torch is likely to be visible. the most that will probably be visible is some sparks over the right hand shoulder. Only draw in these sparks where the sprite isnt drawn. This will mean when you delete the sprite layer to leave just the item later, that the images wont overlap in the game.

Your first 3 tiles for your new torch may look like this now :


A few sparks just normally for the first two walking images, but then a lot more for when the player attacks with the torch swinging it.

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Zoom in to your sprite. This time the weapon is the furthest forwards of all the sprites (i think) and as such you can have the sprite overlay all the armor and the normal sprite however you like. Draw in how you want the torch to look just like before (still on the extra layer just for the torch).

Remember to put in an impressive looking swing for the torch attack.


So it should look something like that…

----FACING LEFT AND RIGHT----

Same deal as before, zoom in, draw it in remembering that its being held in the right hand. Im not uploading pictures because by now you should have been able to figure out how we're doing this. Torch starts at the hand, if its in front of the sprite, draw it there. If its behind the sprite dont draw it there. easy.

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By now you should have your sprite wielding a rather fiery looking torch. All you have to do now is delete the layer that has your sprite you pasted onto it, leaving only the torch you have drawn.

(open layers under window menu, right click the layer with the sprite on it > delete layer)

Your image should now look like this :


All you have to do now is put the image for the new item (in inventory on floor etc into where the orange circle was.

Like so.


Save the image as items.bmp in your GFX folder, and choose the item on the first row. The game will automatically read the corresponding row of the new item you just drew in, a torch. Hope that helps everyone, post Questions here and ill try to help.