You can change color, transprency, size etc in the animations tab while making your animations so there is still plenty you can do. Each set of battle animations consists of 25 frames that can be used in the database to set up the animation you want. Battle animations don’t cycle, you need to set them up in the “Animations” tab in the database.Battle animations can play during battles or on the overworld.The Battle 2 (big) version is 640×640, meaning each frame is 128×128.The red and yellow sections shows the position of the Hero portraits and bars if you use Type C. The lower bluish portion shows what will be covered by the battle menu if you choose layout A or B. Just make sure that its layer is below everything else in battle except the background.Template: (More on this later in the picture section). Use the Show picture command to show a picture that you have set up with an animation in mind. Then you change the background in the correct order to give it the appearance of moving.
So you import one background image for each “frame” of the animation you want playing. In the battle events, (Troops tab) use the “Change Background” command to cycle between backgrounds.Want a moving battlebackground? It can be done! Note that depending on the battle layout you use the bottom might be covered by ATB bars, character stats etc, meaning that in practice only 320×160 will actually be visible. The battle background is the lowest layer of combat, meaning that it will be affected by shaking and flashes etc. Battle animations are 480×480, so each frame for the animation will be 96×96īattle backgrounds, or backdrops are static images that are present as background during battle, pretty straight forward.Battlechar sheets are 144×384, so that’s 8 “stances” of 3 frames.Facesets are 192×192, so each face is 48×48.
A charset is 288×256, meaning that each frame is 24×32.The size for each frame is also set beforehand, limiting you in what you can make – but there are some workarounds mentioned at the end of the guide. And then repeat this for each of the 4 directions. Meaning that a charset for example has a “static pose” and then two cycling “moving poses”. The maker uses preset formats for the different resources. JPGs will jumble colors around to make the file smaller, this is fine with large pictures, but for sprites – which are essentially small pixel based graphics this sucks. But never ever use JPG if you want something with transparecy. The game prefers that you save your pictures as PNGs, BMPs also work. I personally used IrfanView, a free photo editing software originally designed to remove the old school red eyed blare that was caused by old school cameras, all ye youngsters who only take photos with your phone probably don’t get it.
In Photoshop, or GIMP, or Aseprite or any other pixel editing tool there is usually a choice to “index” the colours, or to “create a pallette from present colours” or simply to “change colour depth”. “Well that’s fine, mine doesn’t have that many different colours!” you might say. The trickiest thing with the maker is that it only accepts files capped at 256 colours. Click another color to change which one is transparent before moving on. During this preview 1 color will flash, this will be considered the transparent color in the game. After importing it it will show a preview. Use the Resource Manager in the maker, it’s the import tool that allows you to choose the category and then import the file you want. However, this requires your file to have some things set or it will just appear plain black in the maker, or the transpency won’t work.