Spriting

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Spriting is, according to the Internet's spriting community, the editing and creation sprites as a form of art, particularly as images that might appear in video games. These sprites are usually used in fangames or sprite comics, or are simply used as online avatars. There are also some people, sometimes young children, who are called sprite thieves, who claim various works of spriters as their own. The theft of intellectual property upsets the majority of the spriting community, but certain message boards and websites actually cater to and/or help these "thieves".

Custom spriting

Custom Spriting differs from ripping in that the sprites are the creation of the author. The sprites may be "edits" from existing sprites, or they may be made from scratch. Oftentimes these sprites are in the form of actual video game characters, whether from 3D games with no sprites, or merely new versions of an already 2D character. Sometimes, however, the spriters make their own characters, which may be anything from their own made up Pokémon to pixelated self portraits. Spriters may attempt to follow a particular style of sprites, or merely make their own style. Some popular styles to sprite in include the style of the Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga game, Megaman 7 game, Pokémon games, and Sonic the Hedgehog games. Differences between styles include border style, size, shading, proportion, and types of colors used. The most commonly used program is Microsoft's MS Paint because of the distribution of the program. MS Paint is useful due to its simplicity, but other programs such as Photoshop and The GIMP can prove to be more powerful tools of greater complexity for spriting, in particular as a result of the layer function. Since the custom sprites are the work of the artist, and they have often spent hours working on them, it is a good idea to give the artist credit for their work.

A distinction is sometimes made between sprites and pixel-art. Technically, an image is only a sprite once it has been integrated into a larger image, as in a video game. However, the image as it exists independently from the larger context falls into the category of pixel-art. This is essentially the same as the difference between a single drawing and an animation; the larger is a composite of the smaller.

As such, so-called "pixel-art comics" are, in reality, the same as sprite comics. Despite this, such a title is still a useful term as it tends to distinguish between those comics that are based on video games and those comics that merely use sprites to tell an original tale.

Recolors, categorized as merely changing the color-scheme of a sprite, is sometimes viwed as "sprite edits," but only in the loosest sense possible since a simple technique using MS Paint can instantly recolor any sprite sheet. Recolors are often categorized as the lowest form of spriting and considered amateur work in many circles.

Sprite ripping

Sprite ripping is the term used for copying certain Sprites from a game and then pasting groups of sprites to a sprite sheet. People use emulators and Game ROMs to play the games, from which they try to copy every 'pose' of a sprite regardless of if it is an object, character, or effect. They then paste the individual poses onto a large file (the "sheet") in a program such as MS Paint. This process, although commonly referred to as ripping, is actually the process of "capturing" sprites. Actual ripping involves going into the actual programming of the game and extracting the sprites directly from the binary code. This process is more difficult to learn, and fewer people know how to do it.

Once all the sprites have been pasted and organized on the sheet, spriters may add tags, messages or titles to make the sprite sheet look good and pose restrictions on their usage. Although they may ask you to E-mail or credit them on anything you do with the sprites, these may not be legitimate claims because they do not own the copyright and therefore didn't create the sprites. They did however, put effort into "ripping" them. It is more of a matter of good manners whether or not to give credit.

Sprite dumping

Another form of sprite ripping is sprite dumping, which is the same as the actual sprite ripping process, except for the fact that the ripping is fully automated, e.g. one does not need to go through the binary. In 3D games this is called texture dumping, since it involves textures being dumped. So far only emulators for 3D games have texture dumpers.

Sprite sheets are often first saved as .bmp files for MS Paint and other personal uses. They can then be saved into more compact .gif or .png formats to show to other users on the Internet or sent into sprite archives.

Also See:

• Spriters Resource
• Shyguy Kingdom
• Sprites Unlimited
• Sprites Database

See also

Pixel art Sprite Comic