Making Walkabout Graphics

Okay, use ESC to back up to the graphics menu, and pick Draw Walkabout Graphics

Walkabout pictures are the small pictures used for heroes and NPCs on the overmap. Each character uses eight pictures, two for each of four directions. Look in the top righthand side on the screen. See where it says Up A ? Press right, and this will change. Start with Down A of Set 0, and press ENTER to begin editing.

The sprite drawing program looks a little different than the maptile editor, but it works pretty much the same way. The important difference is that while maptiles can use any of the 256 available colors, Sprites can only have a palette of 16 colors.

The big palette of colors is your Master Palette. the small palette of colors below it is your "current palette". You will use these 16 colors to draw your picture. The first color, Black, is transparent. Click on one of the other colors in your palette, say, Green. Now green is your current color. If you want to change that palette color to something else, you can click in your master palette to change it.

The controls in sprite editing mode are as follows:

Arrow keys move your cursor
SPACEBAR places a pixel, Fills an area, or start/finish a line or box
Hold ALT and press arrow keys alters your current palette color
period and comma change which palette color you will draw with
ENTER or Right-Click matches the current drawing color with the pixel under the cursor
TAB starts a box. Size the box with the arrow keys, and finish with the SPACE BAR.
[ and ] pick your current palette
S switches to the "Scroll" tool
D switches to the "Draw" tool
B switches to the "Box" tool
L switches to the "Line" tool
F switches to the "Fill" tool
BACKSPACE reverses the image
CTRL+C copies the picture (copy and paste only works within CUSTOM. You cannot copy and paste to and from other programs)
CTRL+V pastes the picture opaquely
CTRL+T pastes the picture transparently
ALT+C copies the palette
ALT+V pastes the palette
I allows you to import a 16-color BMP file
Press ESC when finished

Using the circle tool, the fill tool, and the line tool, let's make a simple character

Maybe he ain't much to look at, but it's a start. Press Esc to go back to the walkabout menu.

Oops! What do you do if you accadentaly drew a down-facing walkabout picture in the slot marked Up A. Down-facing pictures should go in the slots marked Down A and Down B. No problem, just Press CTRL+C to copy the picture you just drew, move the cursor over to the Down A slot, and press CTRL+V to paste him. Do it again for Down B

Now you need to draw the rest of the pictures for this walkabout set, up right, and left.

Now let's say we don't like the colors we used. No need to draw him again, we will just create a new palette. Select one of the pictures to get back into drawing mode. See the wide rectangle just below the word Pal 0? That is your current palette. Choose the next palette by pressing ] or clicking the right-arrow next to Pal 0. Don't worry! Your picture didn't get erased! The new palette is just blank. Click on a slot in the current palette, and assign a color to it by clicking on a color in the master palette. Fill up your new palette with colors.

If you don't have your picture centered just right, you can realign it by holding CAPSLOCK and pressing the arrow keys.

As with maptiles, you can copy and paste with CTRL+C and CTRL+V and you can also copy palettes with ALT+C and paste them with ALT+V

And lastly, You can mirror the picture with BACKSPACE. I find this very usefull for saving drawing time. Draw left facing pictures, copy them to the right facing slots, and reverse them! haha!

This same process applies to all sprites-- that means Walkabouts, Heroes, Enemys, Weapons, and Attacks. The only difference is the size of the pictures, and the number of pictures in a set.

Making Walkabout Graphics

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