Top Down Sprite Maker

Desktop GUI application for generating fully configurable pixel art character sprite sheets in various art styles

Making myself

Top Down Sprite Maker (TDSM) is a flexible and powerful pixel art character creation tool.

I took a logic-first approach with the code, which resulted in a highly flexible, modular design that can easily be adapted to any style of pixel art sprites with any complexity of composition rules.

Key Features

Complex customization logic: Customization layers are connected with rules that cause them to affect each other
- Layer masks: Equipping a hat or helmet will mask the hair pixels that should be confined by the headwear [ screenshot ]
- Dynamic updates: Changing your body type propagates changes to your clothing layers to reflect the updated sprite dimensions without altering the data of the clothing equipped [ screenshot ]
Controlled randomization: Each customization layer can be "locked"; locking a layer will ignore it when a random sprite is generated, giving the user granular control over which components may be randomized [ screenshot ]
100% configurable sprite sheets
- Custom sprite size: Pad or crop each animation frame at any edge for sprites ranging from 1x1 pixel to 128x128 [ screenshot ]
- Sequencing & Inclusion: Determine the order of directions and animations in the exported sprite sheet, as well as which directions and animations to include [ screenshot ]
- Layout: Determine the axis along which directions and animations are exported in the sprite sheet, as well as how distinct animations follow one another [ screenshot ]
Export formats: In addition to the standard PNG sprite sheet, TDSM optionally exports the sprite sheet's metadata in a JSON file, and the sprite sheet as a Stipple Effect project with the contents of each customization layer on its own layer in the file [ screenshot ]

Development

Designed and implemented a desktop GUI application, only using dependencies that I wrote myself
Made/adapted all base pixel art assets myself using Stipple Effect, my own pixel art editor

Technologies

Java

The source code for TDSM is written in Java 17.

Delta Time