Creatures Caves

SpaceShipRat wrote:
-in what order do you usually do things? alphabetically? head first? adult sprites, then shrink them for children? How often and how soon do you test them in game?

It seems easiest to do the heads first, just to get them out of the way since they take so much time. Afterwards it usually feels like it's "all downhill from there", so to speak, since the other body parts take so little time in comparison.

I usually make sprites two or more times larger than adult size, because I've found that making adult sprites and then shrinking them 75% or 50% or 25% tends not to look very nice... starting out a little bigger and then shrinking the sprites for all ages has always given me much nicer-looking results. But since I don't draw sprites by hand, making them bigger doesn't make any more work for me.

Testing is all personal preference. I usually wait until all the sprites are finished, just because I like completing one step at a time rather than going back and forth working on different body parts. Unless some body part is causing crashes or something.

SpaceShipRat wrote:
-do I have to do something particular with my color pallette (I currently just have Gimp, btw) to make it show up correctly?

I don't know about GIMP but you can try using a test sprite or two and see how well it imports. If it is an issue, I'd recommend making a full sprite sheet, then copy-pasting it from GIMP to Paint to SpriteBuilder. That'll nix any potential formatting issues and is much easier and quicker than dealing with thousands of bitmaps.

SpaceShipRat wrote:
-is there any script or shortcut to process multiple images, rather than saving each single frame and importing it into spritebuilder? Maybe something to rotate the parts that just need to be rotated? I seem to recall something of the kind.

Even if formatting isn't a concern, sprite sheets are far superior to any method of handling individual sprites. Just use Cut -> Automatic Uncut to Clipboard to copy a sprite file to your clipboard in sprite sheet format, or paste a sprite sheet into SpriteBuilder and use Cut -> Automatic Cut to slice it up into individual frames.

I don't know about rotating body parts. The only automation of that kind that I know of is when you're rendering a 3D model. Rotating tiny body sprite images tends to look sucky.

SpaceShipRat wrote:
-quadruped norns, what's the state of the art? are there any successful quadrupedal breeds? Would it just need ATT changes, or would they absolutely need a genetically different walking cycle?

I'm not sure why you'd want to edit the ATTs but not the genetics, since doing it the other way around is easier IMO? When you think about it, baby Norns are basically quadrupeds already, their hands just don't look like that much they're walking on them because of the sprites.

SpaceShipRat wrote:
-can the game deal with differently sized images, say if I wanted one position of the body to have big, spread wings, and the other to have folded wings? I assume something like that would play havock with breeds with different ATT files, but within the same breed, is that possible?

You do not want to sprite frames used by the same part to ever be different sizes; this is a big no-no for any kind of agent. It worked in the older games, but C3/DS cannot handle it. Agents get away with a bounding box error, but it causes nasty crashiness for breeds.

Some C1toDS and C2toDS breeds do have differently sized sprites and still manage to be stable, but those specific examples are Creatures voodoo and defy what normally happens when someone tries it. Just add extra black space to the sprites that aren't as wide, or if they're unreasonably large or something, you might pare the wings out and see if you can make them separate body parts (such as, ears).