Making Creature Sprites 101

This page will serve as a walk through making the art for your creatures

When it comes to the art for a creature, you need only TWO images. 1. The sprite image for all the frames of your creature out in the wild 2. The item image (which can be bundled with other creature's item images to save space) One important thing to consider is whether you want to use a classic sprite for your creature, or a complex sprite. Classic sprites are 3 animations "tall" as shown below. Moving creatures will have two animations for moving; one for going left and one for going right, then a third animation to use while they run away.

Examples of classic sprites.

Examples of classic sprites.

You can instead use a complex sprite, which is 6 animations tall, and uses one animation for walking down, another for walking right, another for walking up, another for walking left. They also have a separate row for "idle" frames shown while they aren't moving (One for each direction), and then a final animation to show when they are running away.

Example of complex sprite.

Which kind of sprite you want to use is ultimately up to you! For the item sprites, they are 16 by 16. Below is an example of a fly sprite, along with its item sprite.

Fly simple sprite

Fly Item Sprite

These assets should be placed somewhere in your mod folder and then loaded, here is an example doing that in the content.json file of a CP mod.

        {
            "Action": "Load",
            "Target": "Mods/NITVExample/Fly, Mods/NITVExample/FlyItem",
            "FromFile": "PNGs/{{TargetWithoutPath}}.png"
        },

The "Target" locations that you use will be referenced later when you actually make your creature.

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