Rob's guide to DMing

[StarMann]

A few additional tutorials for the back end of things.

EC SPRITES

For those of you attempting to make big EC sprites and keep running in to a brick wall due to file size. There are only 4 states you need on the sprite to have everything work correctly.

A no name state
cast_dir
charge_dir
charge_omni

These are all the states you need to use 90% of the spells in the game.

If you play around with your bar you can even get away with just two states
no name
charge_dir

The latter will allow you to use all spells on a bar like this with no issues

Backgrounds/Props

You'll want to spawn the Prop item in the spawn object menu to use as your backgrounds. Use edit to set can't pickup and change its layer to 1.5. Also give it a unique name so that you can isolate it in edit if you need to use multiple props. Be aware that players are unable to use Click Teleport if your arena uses a prop as the background.

The best I've found for backgrounds is to have a 1800x1800 canvas with the background centred in it and a mono coloured border around it. This will allow for you to have the players occupy a map space anywhere without having the games default grass/sand/rock textures to distract them.

Do note that if a background's palette is too broad and it is not saved as a PNG you may have difficulties using the 1800x1800 as one piece. In these situations you can split it into as many pieces as necessary and spawn them in as separate props. Either picking them up to arrange them or if your resolution isn't high enough to support picking up large props you can use the pixel_x and pixel_y edit stats to move them across the screen as needed.

Here's an example 1500x1500 background and how it looks with player characters on it