This is an easy to use tool which uses free, open art, allowing you to easily make thousands of unique character spritesheets for your game or project. I made this tool when I was making my game to allow me to make lots of different characters and combinations of clothes, hair, weapons, beards, etc. I didn't want to use the short default sprites that come with the RPGMaker MV game engine, and I didn't have the money to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on having somebody make them all for me. It is based on the Universal LPC Sprite Sheet project which is a free, open source project aimed at providing free character art for 2D games.
There are over 4,000 spritesheets which can be combined in countless ways using the tool. So, literally hundreds or thousands (maybe even millions) of combinations.
Yes. You can use any sprites you build in your game, free or commercially. All art is dual licensed under the terms of GPL3 and CC-BY-SA3. Basically, you must credit the original artists of any assets used, and any sprites you make must also be made available free for others to use - so make sure you make them accessible. If you do not want the sprites you make for your game available for others to use then this is not an appropriate solution for you because all art is taken from the aforementioned Universal LPC Sprite Sheet project and that is simply the terms of using it.
If you find this tool and artwork helpful, you can donate to it's continued development through Paypal below. Or, you can support me by purchasing my game for less than $5, which led to the development of this tool in the first place. Lastly, you can make new spritesheets and send them to me directly and I will add them add to the builder tool for others to benefit from.
Random is just a quick way to create possible characters without too much thinking and time wasting. Not all of the randomly chosen parts always fit (child parts don't fit on adult bodies, some female clothes don't fit on male bodies, etc.) - so then tweak them manually or hit random again until you get something you like.
Sometimes you have a character and you want to make small variations of it. For example, maybe your main character at some point has to change his hair style, or pants. Templates let you save the character so you don't forget all the parts that made it, and quickly reload it later on so you can make the small changes you need and export a new sheet. Saves a bunch of time.
I made it for RPGMaker MV, but from what I can tell you should be able to use in RPGMaker VX/Ace because the animation process is similar - but I haven't tested it so I don't know for sure. The output files are simply PNG spritesheets, so if you are making your game in another engine you should be able to figure out how to use them in your engine with a small amount of effort. If you do, let me know so I can add instructions for other people.
Your exported spritesheets will be named something like '$Sprite%(8).png'. Let's break this down. The '$' at the front tells RPGMaker this spritesheet is not a multi character spritesheet. The '%(8)' tells the plugin it is an 8 frame animation sheet. If you were using a 4 frame animation this would change to '%(4)'. RPGMaker will then correctly play each frame in order. To get your sprite to work in RPGMaker MV follow these steps:
I modified these spritesheets (and created some new ones) for my own game. I chose 8 frames for animation, and a 77x77 pixel frame size because I thought that looked good. If you want different sizes you can scale up or down the PNG files in Gimp or Photoshop. If you want an entirely different style of character (say more cartoony for example) then you would have to make your own spritesheets.
Each part of the sprite (hair, pants, etc.) is created as layers which sit on top of each other. If you want to make your own clothes or hats or anything else you need then you can create the spritesheet in an art program like Photoshop or Gimp, and then add them to the sub folders of the project. If you do this and send them to me I will add them to the builder tool as well for others in the community to benefit from.
You can. However, it has more animations and does not create spritesheets ready to just drop into RPGMaker. You would have to cut them up in an art program or a tool like Imagei Magick, and make sure everything was perfectly sized. Also, some of the animations use different frame sizes and frame quantities. I did all this work, here in this tool, for the basic walking animation (up, down, left and right), making it easy to instantly drop in RPGMaker without any editing. Also, I resized the original spritesheets from Universal LPC project to be about 20% larger, because that is the size I wanted for my own game and I thought it looked better. So, yes you can use all that art but you'll need to do some work to get it to work in RPGMaker.
Based on demand there are some improvements that could be useful. If you are interested in any of these or in helping to create them please contact me.