Sprite Sheet Builder Tool
I have recently found a great tool for creating sprite sheets. I have been using a Java tool called Packer created by Kev Glass who wrote the Java game API called Slick.
The new app I have found is called Zwopple and is currently a web based Flash application, although I think plans are in place to create a downloaded AIR based version. It generates both the PNG file for the sprite sheet image along with a control file that is actually a plist file. That makes it SOOO easy on the iPhone to process :o)
I’m currently using this for Sir Lamorak’s Quest and I must say that I am really impressed with it. It gives me all the feature I need and best of all I can manually lay out my sprite sheet. The screen shot below shows Sir Lamorak’s Quest sprite sheet inside Zwopple.
Sprite Sheet Builder
I highly recommend you check this app out. It can be found here.
Mike
8 Comments
Nick on November 26th, 2009
Mike,
First I wanted to say thank you for all of the fantastic tutorials you have put up on this site. This tip on building a sprite sheet is great, but I do have one question. Whenever I create images in photoshop 320 x 480 (my game is landscape) at 164.83 ppi, parts of the background graphic are fuzzy (especially areas with gradients). I have looked everywhere for an answer to this and I couldn’t find one. I thought that since you were working on your game you might have an idea why this is happening. If you have any ideas or want me to email you a picture just let me know.
Thanks
mike on November 26th, 2009
Hi Nick
If you can email me a picture of what you are seeing that I’ll take a look.
Mike
Nick on November 27th, 2009
What is your email? I am not sure if I have the right one.
Eugene on November 27th, 2009
Hi, Nick.
To solve your problem, try to turn off png compression in your project settings in Xcode.
Project Info -> Build -> Packaging -> Compress PNG files
It’s only a guess. So just try and tell us about the results.
Gareth Jenkins on December 3rd, 2009
Hi Mike – thanks for the pointer.
The bottleneck in our current workflow is stuck at separating layers in Photoshop. From there it’s generally plain sailing (we just use Illustrator’s move tool to shift the right bits around).
You don’t happen to know if it it supports specific image replacement do you? i.e. importing a new version of the same sprite? I did have a look, but it’s not obvious without setting up a test workflow. We tend to update animation frames quite a lot – which is pretty straight forward done manually.
G.
Siamak on December 21st, 2009
@Nick
I had some problems with fuzzy images as well, specially because my game has a zoom in/out option, to solve the problem you have to change the way the OpenGl does texturing, the default texturing option in the tutorials is LINEAR, you need to change this to MIPMAPPING, although MIPMAPPING is a way to texture better when zooming, it still will give you better texturing results without zooming, hope this helps.
Nick on December 23rd, 2009
@Siamak
That sounds like a good idea. I will definetly give it a try.
Tools: Texture Atlases at Under The Bridge on November 23rd, 2009
[...] Zwopple which we just noticed as being highly recommended over at 71^2 [...]