Creating sprites for use with Game maker

[cigsthecat]

Can anyone tell me how to make some attractive sprites? No matter what I try they seem to be really screwed up. If I just put the sprite on a colored bg and then click transparent in GM I always get a bunch of fuzz around the sprite in that color. The color of the bg is different from the sprite, as instructed. This seems to be the way the tutorials do it, but I must be doing something wrong here.

Making any sort of transparent image in Photoshop also creates a mess- white outlines or stray pixels on the edge.

What I need to be able to do is scan in inked drawings and get them into sprite form. Attractive, sexy hi res sprite form. If anyone can help with detailed file type/step by step instructions you just may save my computer from serious bodily harm.

[Herr Schatten]

If you get fuzz around your sprite, either in GameMaker or in Photoshop, it means that those pixels are not really the same colour as the background colour. It might look as if they are the same, but it's very likely that they differ slightly in their RGB values, especially when they are scans, which surely are anti-aliased.

The only way to avoid this is to clean the edges of your sprites manually. For this you need total control over your colour palette. At work, we mostly use ProMotion for our sprites. It gives you excellent control over your colour palette.

Since your source material are inked drawings I assume they have an outline of some colour around them. When cutting away the background, make sure you don't use the anti-aliasing selection tools in photoshop as they will give you the fuzzy edges you want to avoid.

Another way would be using an extra alpha transparency mask to declare which parts of your sprites are transparent and which are not. That way you can even keep the anti-aliased edges. I don't know if GameMaker supports them, though.

[cigsthecat]

Thanks very much- I scanned a drawing as a bitmap, then changed it to RGB color. Cut it out with magic wand, but turned off anti-aliasing. Colored it, resized it, then zoomed in and cleaned it up with the 1 pixel eraser. Finally put it on a color bg, flattened and saved as a GIF. And it worked! Again, thanks a ton.

What a pain though. Any idea what process they would use for hi-res 2D, like GGX for example? And does anyone know if that kind of quality can be achieved with Game Maker?

[mrMagenta]

Nice sprite!
Still has a few bright pixels along the border but theese will only pop out when the background is very dark and if the resolution is low.

In gamemaker you can use an alpha channel with your sprite to define transparency. it's the draw_sprite_ext_src call if i remember correctly. That way you'll get rid of jaggies, but it would cost a great deal in preformance if you're making a manic shmup. If you're aiming for a modern PC spec, it's doable though. Question is if it really matters enough to make the sacrifice.

Btw Cigs, i dig your website.

Schatten: I'm also using pro motion. Haven't seen anyone else use it before, even though it's a great tool. Soon after I bought it they released version 5. Is there anything useful in that release? The website has really poor information on what the the difference is (compared to 4.7)..

[Herr Schatten]

Schatten: I'm also using pro motion. Haven't seen anyone else use it before, even though it's a great tool. Soon after I bought it they released version 5. Is there anything useful in that release? The website has really poor information on what the the difference is (compared to 4.7)..

I can't really comment on that, because I haven't worked a lot with 4.7 before we upgraded to 5.0, so I can't really compare. The only things I can recall offhand are some shortcuts that seem to have changed and an option to show the transparent colour ...well, transparently. For the latter you get the light grey/white checkerboard you know from Photoshop representing the transparent areas. Not a big deal.

I suggest you just write an email to Cosmigo, the creator of ProMotion, and ask him. He's really nice. You can also always write to him if you have any ideas on how to improve ProMotion. If he thinks they're worthwhile, he'll include them in the next version. One day we weren't quite satisfied with how the dithering tool worked, so we just wrote to him and he sent us a patch that changed it just the way we wanted within a day.

[ForteMP3]

Thanks very much- I scanned a drawing as a bitmap, then changed it to RGB color. Cut it out with magic wand, but turned off anti-aliasing. Colored it, resized it, then zoomed in and cleaned it up with the 1 pixel eraser. Finally put it on a color bg, flattened and saved as a GIF. And it worked! Again, thanks a ton.

What a pain though. Any idea what process they would use for hi-res 2D, like GGX for example? And does anyone know if that kind of quality can be achieved with Game Maker?

edit- here is the sprite I made. Not perfect, but I'm definitely done for tonight. I still don't understand why some BG colors work and others don't.

You could get GGX style hi-res with enough work, but I would NOT recommend it. Lower resolutions are better in GameMaker, as larger resolutons mean larger rooms, which means more processing.

As for transparencies, I don't know what you mean exactly, but if you mean what I think you do (About some sprites not having transparent BGs) here's the thing.

In GameMaker, the pixel in the lower left corner of the sprite is the transparency color. So if you have a sprite that actually has a used pixel in that corner, you'll need to increase the Y dimension of the sprite by 1 so you can have a line below it that is the transparent color.