making sprites

I am making sprites for my Dragonball Z clone of Liero, and have encountered some problems.

I do not want to use a 3d modeler...because I dont need that....this is a 2d game....a 3d modeler is way too much to use for this....

I have tried hand drawing my sprites in paintbrush....but that makes them look childish and not very well done.

Are there any good sprite making programs out there? I need a program that would aid me in making my sprites. Especially when my sprites for characters have to be as small as 13x13 pixels....

One technique I've seen is to hand-draw your sprites with pencil
and paper then scan them. Clean up the scan, then paint in your
colors/shadows/etc.. If I'm not mistaken that's what Capcom did for the Street Fighter 2 game series.

http://tsugumo.swoo.net/tutorial/

and

http://www.gaminggroundzero.com/home.html under "resources"

Quote:

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One technique I've seen is to hand-draw your sprites with pencil and paper then scan them. Clean up the scan, then paint in your colors/shadows/etc..

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Yeah, I've heard that too, and the people I heard that from had some killer 3D figures.:cool: I was going to buy a scanner a few weeks ago, so I could do this. However, I realized that it would be of no purpose to me right now, because I wouldn't be able to implement the figures into my games (bad consoles!). Over the course of this school year I have become much better at drawing from doing all of my sketches during my insanely simplistic math class.

Paint Shop Pro 6 (NOT 7, 7 is slower for some reason)
of Photoshop 6 or 7.

those are the tools of choice

Well, I just made a sprite, just seeing how good I could do. I think it's pretty good, seeing as it's my first try at a character. Anyhow, I will attach the .bmp. I used techniques I learned from the posted link http://www.gaminggroundzero.com/file...ritemaking.doc

Pretty cool little guy. Looks like a sprite you'd see in a 2d rpg.

(nt)

The link does not work :( but you coded that in C?

No, I would gather from the discussion that this just refers to the image, which is a bitmap. The bitmap will be read in by the program at runtime.

So rather than coding the sprite directly, you draw the sprite in some kind of photoshop style program and then save it as "raw" bitmap data. As long as you know the dimensions and exact format of the data, this is the easiest kind of image to process, because it does not have a header and is uncompressed.

Here's an example of what I mean by "format": a normal (non-transparent) bitmap contains 3 bytes per pixel. These occur in the file in order, row by row, from the top left corner. The data is said to be interleaved because it alternates Red value, Green value, Blue value (as opposed to organizing the file with 3 sections).

Some image software such as gimp will do an image dump into C code. For example, here is the first little bit of my current avatar. This was created by loading the jpg into gimp and resaving it with the extension .c instead of .jpg. I don't know what other image editors will do this -- it's actually of debatable value, since if you compile a few of these in it will increase the size of your executable substantially. It would be more normal, as I said, to save the image as .raw, in a separate file, and then read it in at runtime:

Code:

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/* GIMP RGB C-Source image dump (CIAvatar.c) */

static const struct {
  unsigned int  width;
  unsigned int  height;
  unsigned int  bytes_per_pixel; /* 3:RGB, 4:RGBA */
  unsigned char  pixel_data[55 * 55 * 3 + 1];
} gimp_image = {
  55, 55, 3,
  "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\1\0\0\1\0\0\1\0\0\1\0\0\1\4\0\0\7\0\0\16\0\0\14\1\0\0\11\6"
  "\0\11\5\0\6\0\0\10\0\5\10\0\14\10\2\16\3\0\4\6\0\0\11\1\0\12\1\0\15\4\0\32"
  "\16\0!\25\0&\34\0-#\0'\36\0""8.\0-\"\0*\36\0""1!\0%\25\0#\17\0\22\0\0\25"
  "\6\0\10\0\0\3\0\0\0\2\1\1\2\4\0\1\2\0\0\2\11\11\13\1\0\4\0\0\2\4\4\6\2\7"
  "\3\0\4\0\0\7\0\0\2\0\1\1\0\1\0\11\1\0\16\0\0\13\0\0\2\0\2\0\0\1\0\0\1\0\0"
  "\1\0\0\1\0\0\1\0\0\1\0\0\0\5\0\0\11\2\2\16\0\0\11\1\0\0\3\0\0\11\4\0\12\3"
  "\0\7\0\0\13\1\0\12\2\0\7\0\0\12\1\0<4!c[F\207\201i\234\226\200\212\205o\211"
  "\211q\227\231\201\215\217w\216\216t\177~_\230\224q\230\223m\222\212f\241"
  "\230y\204zac[H%\36\14\30\25\4\5\3\0\3\1\0\6\5\0\21\17\22\1\0\4\0\0\4\22\22"
  "\24\0\1\0\0\2\0\0\5\1\0\2\0\0\2\0\1\0\0\1\0\5\1\0\13\0\0\7\0\0\2\0\1\0\0"
  "\2\0\0\2\0\0\1\0\0\1\0\0\1\0\0\1\0\0\0\11\0\0\13\0\0\5\16\14\17\2\0\1\7\3"
  "\4\3\0\0\4\0\0\17\14\0\7\3\0\15\4\0UK\15\301\265\213\253\243\214vppGFV\40"
  "%B-:\\\32,P\36""4Y\17'K\37""6X\34""0U\35,S\37+U,5`\36&MCIcqrv\263\262\240"
  "\261\255\207MF\30\25\13\0\10\0\0\6\0\0\2\0\12\4\5\12\0\1\2\0\3\0\0\3\0\0"

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This goes on for another 300 lines. As you can see, directly coding an image would be very tedious.

.xpm images are C code, if you look at them in a text viewer instead of an image viewer, eg:

Code:

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/* XPM */
static char *Toaster[] = {
/* columns rows colors chars-per-pixel */
"48 48 90 1",
"  c #020202",
". c #0C0C0C",
"X c #141414",

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Again, the only problem with this is you must compile it in to take advantage of the format.