Advice for modding artwork?

[SeventhAlias]

Hey all! I'm trying my hand at pixel art and am hoping to make some alterations to X-Piratez. Specifically, I'm going to try and add in some custom body sprites for peasants, ubers, and maybe SS that I'm making in a style closer to the nekomimi. I've dinked around a little bit and I've found out how to mess with sprites and stats for armor, so I might be able to figure this out on my own, but I've had bad luck trying to mess with mods in the past, and I know that things are done the way they are for a reason. So, I have two questions. First, which of the eight palettes in the Palettes folder does X-Piratez use, and if I use the palette provided with the neko body sprites (as it defaults to in Aseprite), will it show up the same way in game? And second, would anyone be willing to clue me in on anything else I might need to know before I start changing things? That's a pretty open ended request, but any input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[MaxMahem]

Well I've been deep in the middle of doing this as well (as witnessed by the Hover Armor mod I posted). So I can provide some pointers I guess.

#1. While Piratez uses some custom pallets, you will be just fine using the ones that come with the sprite (or using the default pallets). But if your curious, they are in the Resources\Pal directory. Picking one to use is somewhat tricky, as which Palet is used depends on the mission, as you may have noticed. I think the "delicious" one is a reasonable default to pick though. (The default pallets are in the Common\Palettes directory if you like).

#2. The Unit Sprite tool is great for previewing a sprite sheet if you want to edit those (though I still mostly use asprite to modify them). I don't have a link handy, but you can find it with the search function.

#3. Layers are your friend. Your armor can and should be a separate layer from the body sprite, and depending upon what you are doing, it may make sense to have different bits be different layers so you can layer them as you like on the paper doll. If you look at the hover-armor I did, I did that for the jet-backpack.

#4. The naming convention for the layering is a little puzzling. Search will get you the doc on it, but the basics is your sprite-id (as defined in extra-sprites, not the filename, that's irrelevant) needs to follow this pattern:

  The prefix, as defined for your armor,
  Two underscores
  The number that defines where it is in sequence in the layer definition (ie, is it the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc, item in the brackets)
  Two underscores
  The sprite-id as it appears in the layer definition.

I think the layer definition sequence is 0 indexed. But you'll get an error message if you do it wrong which should point you in the right direction.

#5. Not to shamelessly self-promote again, but check that submod I posted yesterday or so. It has all the stuff you need all bound up in one, fairly small rule file, so you won't have to search through a bunch of giant, disconnected rule files for a reference.

#6. Drop by the matrix. As I'm doing some of this myself at the moment, I'd love to talk shop with you on it.

As a bonus, two teasers of projects I'm working on:
Catbarian

This one is almost done, I just finished the final touches (probably) on the sprite sheet. I just need to finalize the stats.

Nekko Ninja (heresy!?)
.
Not completely thrilled with the skirt, and still need to do the sprite-sheet.

[SeventhAlias]

Thanks for the response! It's cool to know someone else is working on something similar. I found the pal folder and... wow. I thought 8 palettes was too many. But, if different ones are used for different scenarios, it looks like I will just have to pick a palette and stick with it, rather than trying to match it up exactly with what you'll see in game (since that'll change so often). So that's really good to know. It also tells me that I should probably look around the various folders and see what's actually there before I change things, since I didn't realize that the pal folder even existed. Yikes. I'll also look into layer naming, since that might be important once I start changing the armors to fit the new body sprites. That said, I wasn't able to find the tool you referred to - I'll keep looking though, because I'm gonna need to make sprite sheets too, sooner or later. I did take a look at your submod - first of all, it looks great (the Catbarian outfit looks really good too btw)! Also, having something finished to reference will make it a lot easier to figure out how to put everything together, and let me check and see what needs to be dealt with before actually using a new armor set, so that helps a lot. I have a tendency to forget I can look things up or look at examples in favor of cluelessly messing with things until they work, so thanks for suggesting that! Lastly... matrix? Not familar.

[MaxMahem]

The UnitSprite tool can be found here.

Matrix is a discord like tool. A link to it can be found here.

[SeventhAlias]

Thanks for the link! I was kind of dreading the sprite sheets - the Unit sprite tool looks much less intimidating. And I'll look into Matrix tomorrow night or Sunday (I'm away from home at the moment). Thanks for clueing me in on that.

[Dioxine]

I have sprites either rendered in original palette, or basic bloax palette. All the other palletes are designed to work with these. I recommend standard if you want clear-cut colors, and bloax if you make things like blended colors.