Scratch RPG | Devlog #01 | Splitting & Stamping Sprite Sheets

Key Takeaways

hello fellow scratchers I've been crazy busy working on an epic scratch RPG project and I'm dead excited because it's destined to be a truly amazing tutorial series what you're seeing here is my current working progress build still far from complete but I thought it would be fun to share with you some of the journey that got me to where I am now you just wait until we talk about the level editor oh man I love this thing please guys do join in the conversation in the comments below this video I'd love to know what you like or dislike or if you see potential for improvements you guys can help direct how this project develops just so cool but let's start at the beginning how did this all begin a month ago I submitted a poll on my YouTube Community tab to gauge the popularity of a handful of possible tutorials an RPG a Sonic game puzzle game rhythm game we had over 8 000 responses and more than half of them voted for an RPG wow exciting now the world of RPGs is very diverse but I had my suspicion that the most popular would be in the style of Zelda A Link to the Past or perhaps undertale a quick Post in the community Tab and my suspicion was confirmed the majority responded very positively to the Zelda theme well okay where do we start looking over a Zelda Wiki page we can find the Overworld map and we could see that the level is huge but this huge map is broken into smaller Square regions and these regions will scroll and are made up of a simple grid of tiles similar to our tile scrolling Mario game tutorial but the time miles oh man the tiles they are So Glorious so detailed and there's so many of them just look through the tile sheets in the wiki and gives you a flavor of what's involved to make this game look as good as it does and this is where things might get tricky how are we going to make our scratch RPGs look as good as this okay we have the scratch paint editor all we need to do is draw a super awesome tile set of our own like in the Legends of Zelda just draw it yeah scrap that what can I find on the internet the open game art site is a great place to start full of pre-made Sprites by talented Bots but I have to be careful that it doesn't feature too many tiles as the tutorial wants to stay simple really minimalist something simple that doesn't use a lot of tiles something exactly like this yes tiny16 by charm the perfect tile set for testing out some ideas in scratch it even comes with a cool adventurous Sprite useful the only problem is that Sprite sheets tend to come as single large image files like this one if I imported to scratch then well poop that's not very useful at all to be able to use these individual tiles we need to split them up one costume per tile now sometimes with small tile sets we can do this by hand but with lots of tiles even 10. this takes way too long and there are better ways for example this website I found easygif packed full of useful tools one of which is a tile splitter found under the split Tab and Sprite sheet cutter sub tab we can just upload the Sprite sheet that we downloaded and then set the tile size these ones are 16 by 16 and then cut now don't worry if you miss any of this I'll be going over it again in the official tutorial later on but yeah all the tiles are now separated into their individual files we download them as a zip and extract the files into a new folder and finally upload them in bulk into scratch boom all the tiles perfectly laid out ordered and ready to rock what a time saving tip so with a set of tiles all ready to go what kind of tile engine should we build last year we used bright clones to make the Mario tile stroller and this worked really well and there'd be no issue reusing it for her RPG but I never passed up the chance to teach you something new what do you know about tile stamping so instead of building the visible level from hundreds of tile Sprite clones we ditched the Clones all together instead having just one tile Sprite and then actually paint the screen manually by moving the tile Sprite into position and stamping the costume in place using the pen extension and then we move it and stamp again repeating to fill the entire screen the end results should look identical so the question is is there an advantage to doing it this way well using less clones is always good we can only ever have 300 at most and these get used up right away in a clone engine but also we have a bit more control over how our screen draws being able to choose exactly when and how to draw each title indeed we can quickly draw more tiles without needing to clone any new Sprites which will be super useful when making the level editor for example a possible downside is that stamping historically has proven to be much slower than using clones but I have a suspicion that this may no longer be the case there's only one way to be sure I got scratching and knocked up a test project stamping out a simple grid of tiles so I could time how quickly scratch could draw each frame and wow the performance of sprite stamping in scratch has seriously improved over the last couple of years indeed it's tripled in speed bringing it right up to the speed of the cloning engine that is amazing news for us thank you scratch development team for your continued work making scratch perform so well cool it's settled then we'll be learning how to create an efficient tile stamping engine in scratch how exciting but before I can teach you guys I still have a lot of work ahead of me to build the project myself this Avatar Sprite was included in the tile set so I added a player and then got to work building a minimalist level editor always a priority as it's hard to build levels without one and here we are a simple top-down scroller is coming together it's amazing what you can do with just four tiles isn't it these are the four dungeon tile costumes and then up here we have an Overworld Zone showing off the path grass and flower tiles it's all very simple but it gets the job done the level editor is accessed using the zero key her favorite of mine and since we're using stamping I was able to quickly code up a simple tile selection user interface across the bottom of the screen sweet but this is going to get so much cooler you just wait I'm concerned it's the second week of my RPG Dev work and I'm worried about how much work is ahead of us I decided to share my concerns about yet another long tile scrolling tutorial with the community was this really the way to go oh you guys your optimism always gives me a boost okay okay the majority of you were pretty confident that tiles were indeed the way to go perhaps a change of Avatar could spice things up this guy is more chunky and he has an attack animation too yeah I was a bit worried about how I was going to add that to the other guy who didn't come with one cool I like it but what about the other tiles picking a simple tile set was a winner for simplifying the tutorial but I am now worried that everywhere in the level will look the same and how will we add houses and rooms like in Zelda okay so I need a break to think about things so I did something completely different and wrote a new game in scratch eat the level you may have seen it and that was such a blast I just got my creative juices flowing and now it's week three and I'm back on the RPG thinking about text engines all RPGs need these for narrative and dialogue there are plenty of cool looking bitmap fonts available if you Google for them and I found a few candidates sadly since they are not fixed widths like the tiles they need splitting up by hand even so I got away without having to line them up all by hand instead building an automatic Sprite measuring script to the letters into the right positions for me this is awesome as it supports variable width lettering and handles word wrapping as standard do you smell a backpackable tutorial coming your way oh boy yes so watch out for that now I've had an idea perhaps if I could bring in a larger Sprite costume as an entity or prop that sit on top in front of the base layer of tiles this would allow us to add larger buildings or trees into our world this one is just manually placed to get a feel of how it might work and you know it's not that bad of course we'd need to now add Sprite ordering to handle being able to walk behind these props but we have my clone layering tutorial for that right week four now and I've decided this simple tile set and props they've got to go if we're going to the effort of creating a huge RPG series we might as well do things right and Go the whole hog with a far more epic RPG tile set with a bit more Googling I stumbled across this little gem the top-down Adventure Pack by oh Lobster he's posted it on hio and it's available for download to everyone for as little or as much as you want to donate to him and for those who can't afford to pay well that's okay too and I tell you his work is Top Notch very similar to the Zelda style we are after so huge credit to oh Lobster what a champion and oh my word there are a lot of cool tiles here I use Easy gift to split them up and oh wow the Overworld tile cheater loan accounts for an astonishing 250 costumes ouch that's a tad more than our previous 10 tile costumes our level editor is going to need a serious upgrade luckily I already have a plan you'll notice how beautifully the original tile sheet is laid out this makes it so easy to see how the tiles are intended to fit together it would be a shame to lose this layout after bringing them into scratch so I'm thinking we try to borrow the same layout as a tile picking palette my first idea was to have a key press toggle between the level editor and a full screen tile picker but that would have soon become laborious switching back and forth constantly to choose the next tile costume so instead I opted to split the screen leaving a five tile wide platform docked to the right of course now the tile pallet would need to be scrollable to access the entire tile set pretty cool right and boy would this have been far harder to achieve using clones can you imagine I'm really appreciating the freedom that stamping brings us and I'm looking forward to teaching you all about it too so yeah I wanted to keep this devlog relatively short so I'll stop right there but do join me next time to learn how I propose we tackle complex Collision regions between tiles what to do about tile layering with buildings and trees do we even consider over and under collisions and layering and what about tile Auto arranging or is there perhaps a better way to handle this considering the huge RPG tile set we are using well if you enjoyed this video then please smash that like button it would mean a lot to me and don't forget to subscribe to this channel now so as not to miss the next video when it comes out and there's so much more to look forward to I'm just bursting to share this stuff with you and if you're as excited as me then you might want to join the Early Access Channel membership to both support the channel further and guarantee you get the videos as soon as they are made how cool is that well that is it for today I hope you have a great week ahead and scratch on guys [Music]