Eternia Respriting Guide

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The Hair Tool:

  

This tool may be used to create not just hair, but also hats. Its resolution is somewhat restrictive and it does not support animations, but it is a very forgiving method of having your own custom look. You can accomplish this through copy and pasting the below templates into your image editing software of choice. Make sure you create a new layer before drawing over them.

 Blank Hair Template

 Base Hair Template


Or...

A template for those with Aseprite.

(NOTE: If you are going to use the images above then please right click and save them to your desktop and then use that file in your image editor. 'Copying' a .png online can cause it to lose its transparency. The background should never be white.)

 The template has a pink border around it that separates the .png into three different grids. The grids shown each represent a different facing direction which are needed. South, north and east. East itself is copied and mirrored to act as a west facing direction once the tool is used. So be sure to design your sprites around that little fact. The tool will ignore the pink border completely; it is only there to give you a visual indication of how large your playground is. Which is exactly a resolution of 32x40 per grid slice.

With that said go ahead and draw something up.
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Here is a little example of the template being used.



Simple, right? One direction facing the screen, one facing away and the last facing off to the side.
Go ahead and hide the layers you do not want. That includes the base sprite and any backgrounds. You only want the actual sprite visible. (Though you can keep the border, it won't show up anyway.)



Now save this as a .PNG file and head back to the Hair Tool.
You'll want to click 'Select Hair Base'



Then go ahead and find your png using the provided window.



As you can see for some ungodly reason it does not use the normal File explorer, which means it takes extra effort to find any .png's saved to out of the way folders.  You may get used to this struggle in time.



The preview image now shows your template/sprite. Go ahead and click 'Save Results' to proceed.



Make sure you change [ExportName].png to [Exportname].DMI
This is really important. The tool goes through the effort of turning your PNG template into a (nearly) fully completed DMI.
Go ahead and open the exported DMI now.



You are almost done! Sadly The Sprite Converter tool leaves out an important state (A state is one of the above seen categories that is used when a certain action is taken in-game, such as the difference between seeing your character running or dashing). You will now need to create the UI icon state, which allows you to see an item on the ground or in your inventory. Go ahead and right click an empty square and select 'New State'



The bellow window will now open.



Just ignore it for now and click the 'Back' button near the bottom right.



Go ahead and double click your newly created state's name. Change 'No Name' to 'UI' and be sure to keep the capital letters.

Now find which icon you want to use for the UI. Double click a different state (not the name, that will just open a box to rename it) such as walk to open it.



Then go ahead and hover over which image you want to be the UI icon. Such as the highlighted bellow square. Ctrl+C it to copy the frame. 



Then press the back button and just head into your empty UI icon state. Simply paste the copied frame into the vacant one.





Now all you need to do is save the DMI. Top left>File>Save



To apply your new sprite in game you simply drop the item you want the sprite applied to (in this case a Pink Bow) and press F1 while next to it.
Select Sprite Change from the top left



Then select your desired item and click 'OK'



Now find your DMI, select it and click 'Open'.





Pick it up and we're done!

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The Weapons Tool:

As I neglected to go into details about the weapon section of the tool I'll include a footnote weapons template below. 

Here is the reference example.

The left box represents how the weapon will be seen on your 'back' and will cut it up to suit the various movement states. Keep in mind, in the example above, the 'Idle' state will actually come out 'flipped' horizontally once you use the tool. So you may want to design the hilt to rest against the left shoulder, as opposed to the right one as seen above.

The middle box represents the 'swing' animation for when you use it to attack. You can draw the wind if you want but ultimately you can just mirror the idle state if you want to save time.

The right box is the stab state, which shows in a few select spells.

Ultimately with a simplistic weapon you only "really" need to draw two states when using the weapon template. You can copy and paste the below images into your image editing software of choice to start using these. The same rules apply as with the hat template, just with a different resolution and reference material.