NEW OFFICAL SKIN GUIDE:
https://www.notion.so/nomoon/Skin-Guide-e9cdebc4a59b4018adc0634bea58abed

You want to get your awesome skin into the game?
No problem the MINDNIGHT team is very open for nice community art!

Before you start you should consider the following things:

• There is no guarantee that your skin will end up in the game
  
• You maybe have to rework stuff before your skin will get added

What you should bring with you when you want to create a skin?

• Basic knowledge of pixelart and sprite animations

Recommended Tools:

• Photoshop[www.adobe.com]‎, Aseprite[www.aseprite.org],Gimp[www.gimp.org],http://getpaint.net or any other drawing application that you are familiar with
  
• Discord (discord.gg/nomoon)

The first thing that you need is a concept/idea for your skin.
We provide a template in which you can start your skin.




Download: http://www.mindnightgame.com/static/template_fanart.zip

Have in mind that this is scaled up very mutch. In reality each square is exactly one pixel!
This is a real sized image (30px x 51px):

Very small indeed, that’s why its called pixel art :P


Tips:

• Dont use to many different colors

After you have your first basic skin done, it's a good thing to share it with the community (on discord). Players and Developers will give you feedback.

In mindnight there a 8 different colors for each player in a game.

Don’t you worry you don’t have to create the animations for each color :P
The game has a system in build that replaces colors depending on the color of the player.

The colors you are using for all the animations are your base colors and they will get used for all the previews (mainmenu/shop).

What you have to do that the game can recolor your skin is specifying a replacement color for each base color in your skin.

Example:







You can provide this table in csv/xlsx/google sheet or any other table like format.

The system works like this:

For each pixel we check if the color (hex value) is in the list of your base colors and replace it with the color in the same row depending on the player color.

What are sprite animations?

https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/an-introduction-to-spritesheet-animation--gamedev-13099

Its very important that you are 100% done with your skin design before you start the animations.
When you want to change something later you have to change it in all the animations.
So make sure your skin is like you want to have it in the end.
Also its good when you have approval for your skin from the devs (discord).

We have 2 types of animations:
Gestures and Idle animations (at total 18 different animations)

Each animation is packed into one sprite sheet with a total size of 192px x 128px.
And one tile in a sprite sheet has a size of 64px x 64px.

• Each animation has a fixed count of possible sprites in it.
  
• The size of the Sprite sheet or the cells is fixed
  
• The position of the Character is fixed
  
• file name suffix of a sprite is fixed (Skinname_idle_lookingatphone.png)

Here is an example of a sprite sheet from the game (looking at phone).


We also provide a template for all animations here (http://www.mindnightgame.com/static/skin_default_template.zip)

Be creative and have fun :)
Cheers Marcel!