Creating, Managing and Exporting Characters

When you wish to create a new a new character, click "Choose..." under "Character Parts" to bring up the following interface:

Here, you are able to manage and create your characters.

To create a character, start typing in "Name" and hit Enter on the keyboard.

Upon pressing Enter, Character Generator automatically loads in that character and lets you start modifying your character.

The "Save" button next to "Choose..." also becomes available. Make sure to take advantage of the save button as often as possible. However, Character Generator automatically saves progress when you switch characters.

At this point, you can now start to modify your character. First, you have three options immediately below your selected character.

• Name: This is the name of your character. In this case, it's "My Dude", for the hell of it.

• Age: Either "Adult" or "Child" is available. This supplies completely new assets.

• Gender: Either "Male" or "Female" is available. This is ultimately subject to interpretation. However, primarily "Adult" spritesheet assets are affected by this change. "Child" assets do not change with this option.

As it illustrates in the program, changing either Age or Gender will completely reset all asset choices. Make sure you are happy with your selection before proceeding.

Modifying your Character

The first option you can choose is "Skin Color". Let's take a look at modifying colours in Character Generator.

The default colour for all assets is WHITE, but you can select this option to modify this colour.

The colour palette is divided into two sections:

• The upper portion of the colour choices is the colour selection, showing you the colour selected, followed by RGB, HSV and Hexadecimal values if you choose to use this.

• The lower portion is the saved colour palette. Each colour option, such as Skin Colour, Eyes, Hair, etc., have their own colour palettes. These are saved at application level and exist for all projects. There are forty colours in total which is a fixed value. Once this number is reached, newly saved colours will replace the earliest colours first.

Choosing Assets

Currently, you can choose from Eyes, Hair, Head, Chest, Leggings and Feet, with the potential to expand later once more assets become available.

To choose one of these assets, click the "..." button next to the respective feature you wish to modify. Let's look at "Eyes" as an example.

Clicking "..." brings up a new interface, named "Browse Eyes" at the top of the screen. This lets you choose the asset you wish to apply to the character.

There is only one asset for Eyes, which is "Basic Eyes". We will select this for now.

This asset supports three colour layers. These layers also have their own saved palettes.

Each layer in the resulting sprite sheet represents another part of the feature that can be modified for colour. As you can imagine, the possibilities start to become far greater than would normally be possible in traditional Character Generator software.

Let's now look at Hair as a better example for more asset choices.

As you can see, another button appears next to "..." called "Clr". This lets you clear the asset if you no longer wish to use it.

Complete your character and prepare for export.

Export your finished Character

Once you are happy with your options, you can click the "Export..." button on the right hand side of the screen. This will produce a PNG to the output folder and name the file according to the name of your character. Make sure the name of your character has valid file name characters or the export will fail.

You can choose to open the exported file in your default image program on your computer.