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glittergraphics · 4 days ago

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RPG Maker Sprite Formatting Guide (MV/MZ)

[um hi, this isnt really relevant for this blog specifically so sorry people who follow me for completely different stuff but im an rpg maker game dev and my discord resources uses links for organizational purposes. i figured something out about sprites and while there probably isnt a shortage of guides about this i wanted to go over it in my own words in case i ever need to be reminded about it.]

[the pokemon stuff is all placeholders im not making a pokemon fan game]

okay so the walking sprite sheets in rpg maker [MV and MZ] work so that the sprite "detection" grid adjusts to the size and shape of the sheet

so these two sheets are different sizes and ratios (864x768 and 1152x768 / 9:8 and 3:2 respectively) but hold the same amount of sprites. each character has 12 sprites/frames (3 per direction, 4 directions) so a default sprite sheet can hold 8 (separate) characters. (theres two sets of each venusaur to fill out the entire sheet for i guess aesthetics in the file viewer not because he needs all that)

so that means each basic sprite sheet should contain 192 sprite slots (16x12) no matter what size/shape it is

you can also make sheets for single "characters" (those are the only options, 8 characters or 1 character) by putting "$" in front of the file name, it just converts the grid to 4x3 with 12 slots total

(they dont technically have to all be the same character but only do that if you intend to keep the "character"'s direction fixed because it uses the lower sprites in direction changes still if you interact with it from another direction)

it still follows the same 4x3 format so that they can animate using the frames along their row as usual (doors are a completely different story, but that's mentioned elsewhere in the resources)

(also note, "!" is for layering/positioning on the map, it makes it so that the sprite wont get adjusted on the tile in game [i think someone said they get moved up 6 pixels] it basically makes it so whatever sprite youre putting down will be exactly where its preview shows and it will be layered like part of the background/environment)

so another question i had was why people always say the "default" sprites size is 48x48 if that seems to not really matter at all, and its because 1) well that is the default sprite size but 2) thats the size of the tiles on the grid, so you can more or less think of the tiles as the "hitbox" i think? (like not really bc its literally on a grid but ykwim)