I've got an RPGMaker project on the go, but an exorbitant amount of little name sprites need to be made. It's total gruntwork; easy and fairly quick, but hardly the most exciting job. I need to get the name of every weapon written in little sprite letters, and these sprite letters need to be made into charsets. Each thing takes... hm, maybe 40 or 45 seconds?
Here's a little run-through on how to do them:
This is your alphabet file, alpha.png. Zoom in (8x is recommended) and copy-paste the necessary letters together. The bar at the bottom helps line them up horizontally, which they all should do except QU (allow the Q's tail to dip below). Make sure they line up horizontally as well, as shown below:
Paste the letters over each other so that the lines on the edges of the letters overlap. Of course, you don't actually have to make them red, as that's only for the sake of demonstration. To make things a little easier, make the green your secondary color, and use the pasting option that makes your secondary color transparent. If that's not clear enough,
click here.
Don't forget to separate words by a space of 1 pixel. Now, once you have your item completed, Copy/Paste it into fontbase.png. Pick a green rectangle and paste your word near the bottom left corner. You can line up the bottom of the word with the bottom of the rectangle, but be careful when you're aligning the left and right sides. Start by aligning the far left side of the word with the far left side of the rectangle. At the start of the word, always leave a margin of one pixel, just for consistency's sake. Now, if your word is longer than 3 letters (which it almost certainly is), the right side will likely extend past the right edge of the box. Select the remaining letters and drag them into another box, this time forgoing the one-pixel margin. If necessary, keep dragging leftover letters into another box.
Yeah, just like that. Now, once the whole word has been placed, fill in the white and blue background checkers with the same shade of green as the rectangles. Make sure you only fill in the blue/white sections that are touching boxes with text in them. Fill in any white/blue that got stuck inside your weapon name when you were select/dragging, too.
Example.Now repeat ad nauseum, and eventually you'll fill up a
whole sheet. Save it as something other than fontbase.png, rinse and repeat. :D
Of course, there's no commitment. I'm not asking you to sit down every evening and copy/paste letters and words 'till quittin' time. Do as many or as little as you please, whenever you have a minute or two of time to kill. Believe you me, it's a lot simpler than it looks. In the time it'll take you to give this a good through, you could probably do... oh, I'd say five or so items. It'd be a huge help to me (I think there are about weapons in all, but I still have to do skills, jobs, um... and probably other things =/).
Many thanks, all ye who dare aide the mastere. Before I forget, here are the image documents you'll need:
alpha.pngfontbase.pngIf you want to give it a shot, do one or two samples for me, just so I can make sure you've got the right idea. I'm a little OCD about consistency, so it's imperative that everything lines up just right. Let me know if you have any questions, mmkay?
