Attachment-System
Aseprite Attachment System
The Aseprite Attachment System is an experimental plugin to manage hierarchies of sprites in Aseprite using tiles & tilesets. The general idea is to be able to create characters attaching and reusing parts of their body through all the animations, making high-framerate and modular characters possible in pixel-art.
Sponsored by Soupmasters to manage huge animations in Big Boy Boxing.
Experimental
This extension –and this documentation– is a work-in-progress. Based on ideas of Soupmasters team, we’re working together to speed up their workflow. Anyway feel free to use this extension and provide feedback in case you find it useful for your own game.
Overview
The main goal of this plugin is to being able to create sprites drawing different attachments/parts/modules and integrating them to compose each frame. Begin able to exchange those parts on any frame as you need, and re-using as many parts as possible.
Some concept of the Attachment System:
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Attachments: Each layer that uses attachments is a tilemap layer, with just one big tile on each frame. This tile is the instance of the attachment. It means that this tilemap layer uses a tileset where each tile has the whole canvas size (it’s not the regular tileset we’re used to see with small tiles).
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Categories: All categories for same layer are similar tilesets (tilesets with the same number and same order of tiles) where their tiles matches a different variations/alternatives of the same graphic. E.g. You can have a “Base” category for a “Body” layer, but you might have an alternative category called “Armored” with the same graphics as the “Base” but with an armor.
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Folders: Each folder is a place where you can arrange the attachments in any order. There is the “Base Set” folder where all attachments are present, but then you can create your own folders to rearrange and keep your attachments organized based on animations or similarities.
Internals
This Attachment System uses several new features of Aseprite like
extension-defined properties
to store its data in .aseprite files, and canvas widget
and GraphicsContext
to paint the custom Attachment System window.
Also the standard Aseprite tilemap manager is disabled as the plugin
uses tiles to represent attachments. This is possible because the
Sprite.tileManagementPlugin
property is changed by the plugin to "aseprite/Attachment-System".