charactertutorial.txt

Since I've got nothing to do until Monday when I can test LAN, I'm going to START writing a character-making tutorial. I'll insert images to help with the tutorial later.

1. Spriting
	- find (or make) a spritesheet

		- They should have most if not all of the moves sprited, with multiple sprites in each animation. On a good sheet, most attacks have 4+ animations.

		- Sometimes you can get away with a partial sheet, as in one that doesn't have tilts sprited. Just use the other sprites to improvise tilts.

		- If you want a good spritesheet or a specific spritesheet, email me; I've found most of the good ones that are out there and have them saved.

		- If you are really good with graphics, you could make your own spritesheet either as an edit or from scratch, but that would be difficult and time consuming.

	- turn the spritesheet into a spritestrip (using gimp)

		- Take the sprites one at a time and make a vertical strip. The strip should be 64 by n*64 where n is the number of frames. a full strip of all animations probably will be 150 frames or more

		- you might need to scale down the whole sprite sheet, but don't scale down individual sprites

		- Things to watch for

			- feet position (when on the ground) or body position (when in air)

			- don't be afraid to reuse sprites in other animations or even in the same animation. Sometimes it's a good way of slowing down the animation

			- make sure the sprites don't end up in another frame. it helps to have gridlines on 64x64 for gimp.

		- make the background Magenta (FF00FF)

		- you will probably need to insert or delete frames once this is "done"

		- This is a pain, but it gets easier the more you do it. It took me 2 or 3 to get the hang of it