Guide to Spriting

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Sprites are important, you know? If we didn't have sprites, we'd be making a really shitty text based Roblox 2010 roleplaying game. Or maybe one of those DOS games, but multiplayer. Have you seen those roleplay threads on forums, actually? Yeah, like that. Very old. Very sad. As such, spriters are essential artists to the game. They make the walls and floors mappers place down, the icons coders use to modularize, and the pictures we shamelessly steal and put onto the wiki. Their purpose is a great one, and they get to have some good fun too - have you ever looked the sprites that people put in the discord? It's great. It's genuinely wonderful. Art is hard, and people look beyond this to make sick fucking sprites. It's a work of passion that we can attest to. I cannot realistically put into words how important the creation of sprites is. The simplistic visuals are very much needed for this game, and the work put in by spriters to make this happen is appreciated. Trust me, it is.

Oh, you were looking for an actual guide. I forgor, sorry. Go ask in the discord's #spriter-club.

Basics

Sprites in SS13 are stored in dmi files. They're basically spritesheets in a specific format. You put PNGs into it, and name it - that's an icon state. Most dmis are in 32x32. You can have a pixmap, which is a static sprite, and a movie can be animated. BYOND also works with 8 directions, but you'll usually only need 4 or 1.

Software

Aseprite is very commonly used. You can get it for free by compiling the source code, or you could buy it. Some people also use piskel. You can also use some other image manipulation software, like paint.net. I think it has a .dmi plugin, but it hasn't been updated in 4 years.