Introduction to the Sprite Editor

The Sprite Editor allows you import any sprites you have created and group them together to form animations. Once the sprite has been created it will be ready to use in the Entity Editor to form an Entity that can be used in your game.

You can create a new sprite; edit or delete a sprite.

When creating or editing a sprite you will see two windows. The Preview window shows how the current sprite will appear in your game. If you add animations to the sprite then the preview window will show the animated sprite.

The properties window has tabs for setting the sprite properties; the texture that will be used; animation properties; and automatically building sprites and/or animations from a texture page.

The current sprite is highlighted. Adjusting the Position, Width or height will alter the size and position of the current sprite.

The Texture tab allows you to select which texture page will be used for the sprite. Clicking the image will open the texture selector and you can choose the texture that contains the image for your sprite.

The Animation tab contains the tools and properties for animating your sprite. You can select a frame and set the duration of that frame of animation. To select which image is used you can either go back to the Sprite tab and set the position or you can use the cursor keys to move the sprite selection box.

You can select whether the animation should be played in a loop (automatically restarting at the end); and you can also set whether changes to the Duration value should be applied to all the animation frames.

There are options for previewing the animation; and you can use ‘Onion skinning’ to draw the previous 3 frames of animation (faded out) behind the current animation, which can be useful for lining-up animation frames.

The Auto tab provides a tool for automatically building sprites from a texture page. The texture may contain multiple sprites; a sprite with multiple frames of animation; or both.

Creating new Sprites

Newly created sprites will be added to the list of Sprites in the Sprite Editor. However, to use them in-game they must first become Entities so that the game knows how they collide with objects, where bullets should appear, etc.

The Sprite tab contains an option for automatically creating an Entity once the sprite has been created. Select the Create an Entity checkbox and provide a name for the sprite. If multiple sprites are being created (using the Build tool) then a numbered suffix will be added. For example, MyName_1, MyName_2, etc.