Sprites are generally the visual representations of objects
within the game you are creating. As such, a sprite is either a
single image, drawn with any drawing program you like, or a set of
images that, when played one after another, looks like a looping
animation. For example, the following 10 images form a sprite for a
character who is waving his arms while skydiving.
And the actual finished animation would look like this when
placed in a game:
That looks pretty good, eh? Most games need you to make sprites
like this for all the things in your game world, from enemies to
power-ups, from walls to menus, and when you start to make a game
you normally collect or create a set of nice sprites for the
objects you are going to use. A considerable number of useful
sprites can be found on websites such as Open Game Art, which
can be used as "place holders" until you have enough confidence to
make your own or get together with an artist.
To create a sprite, choose the item Create Sprite from the
Resources menu, or use the corresponding button on the
toolbar. Either will cause the following window to open:
As you can probably see, the top left of the window has a field for
the "Name" of the sprite. All sprites (and all other resources)
must have a name given to them so that you (and GameMaker:
Studio!) can identify them easily, although you should note
that the actual name itself is really just a variable which holds a
number that "points" to the resource, in this case a sprite. It's
best to give each sprite a descriptive name so that you can
identify at a glance whether a particular resource is a sprite or
an object or anything else, and many people do this by prefixing or
suffixing the resource with the letters "spr". For example, the
above sky diver sprite could be called spr_SkyDiver or
SkyDiver_spr. Even though this is not strictly required, you
are strongly advised to use only letters and digits and the
underscore symbol (_) in a name of a sprite (and any other
resource) and to let it start with a letter, not a number as this
will become very important once you start using code.
To load a sprite, click on the button Load Sprite. A special
file dialog window opens in which you can choose the sprite you
want to import into GameMaker: Studio:
The left part is a fairly standard file selector in which you can
navigate around your computer and select the sprite that you want
to import. On the right you have a preview of the sprite image you
select and some basic information about its size. Here you can also
indicate a couple of things that you'd like GameMaker:
Studio to do when you import the sprite, like make opaque
(remove any transparent parts), remove the background colour (if it
has one) making it transparent, or whether to smooth the edges of
the sprite (only if it is transparent), which can greatly improve
its appearance. When you have found the sprite you need and
selected the transparency options you like, press Open to
load the sprite into GameMaker: Studio.
GameMaker: Studio can load many different formats of graphic
files - with JPG, BMP, PNG and GIF being the most common bitmap
formats, although you can also import SWF vector sprites and JSON
skeletal animation sprites (made with Spine). There are a
couple of things that should be noted when loading the different
bitmap files:
- When you load an animated gif, the different images of the animation automatically form the sprite subimages.
- When the file name ends with _stripXX, where XX a number, it is considered to contain a strip of XX subimages next to each other, and GameMaker: Studio will import it as such. For example, an image file with the name ball_strip4.png is assumed to contain 4 subimages and will be split up as such when loaded.
- If you have a sprite strip image that you wish to load into GameMaker: Studio which does not have the above-mentioned format, this must be done from the Sprite Editor File Menu.
- Although JPG images are supported, it is best to avoid using this file type as, due to the compression used, the images are generally of poorer quality than either PNG or BMP.
Once the sprite is loaded you are returned to the sprite
properties window where the first subimage is shown on the right of
the screen. When there are multiple subimages, you can cycle
through them using the arrow buttons that appear beside the part of
the window labelled "Show", and, should you make any changes to the
sprite, you can then save it again using the "Save" button.
For a more in-depth look at the sprite editor in GameMaker:
Studio, as well as details on the SWF and JSON formats, you can
go to the Advanced
Section of this manual.