Patch 1.1 Announcement

Thank you for staying with us on this journey towards a complete and more flourished sprite sheet generator for all your development needs, be it in top-down role-playing games, side-scrollers, or even other genres we could possibly mention.

But we all must start somewhere, and now we would like to announce Patch 1.1 which we plan to release in January 2024, starting the new year big. And when we say big, we are talking lots of new features and a new collection of assets.

What we are working on

As you may already be aware, we released Patch 1.0.1 which includes an asset auto-updater. This we will use to keep all your assets up-to-date which will not require a client update to attain them. To achieve this in conjunction with Patch 1.1, releasing a new asset collection alongside, we will be incorporating mechanisms that detect which assets you have installed and update them accordingly when updates become available.

Patch 1.1 will also include various features. You may have heard us mention colour palettes in the past, and so it's time to discuss it.

• Colour Palettes for all assets and asset layers will include not just application-level user choices, but also project-level choices and default colour sets.
• Character Management will be made significantly easier. We plan to put in place a virtual folder structure as well as implementing tags, allowing you to organise your characters for any part of your project a lot easier than before.
• Tag Management will be used to organise your characters as mentioned above. These will be simple but powerful ways to manage your characters. They will be applied simply as key-value pairs which can be exported for the purposes of your project.
• Inline animation handling will also be available. This is a slight interface improvement for the animations that tick at the bottom of the screen. Instead of requiring to manage the current settings in a separate view, they will be moved into the main interface alongside additional options that incorporate new frames for the new asset collection we just mentioned.
• Randomisation of characters will also be included. It makes sense to add colour palettes as just performing rudimentary pseudo-random numbers on RGB channels would result in unnatural aesthetics. This will be fully customisable, meaning the ability to lock in place certain asset choices, or only using certain colour palettes.
• Expansion of the settings will, of course, be applied to customise these new features. Above all, colour palettes will be managed between projects, either copied or transferred, and other settings will be included.
• There will also be the ability to customise what gets exported. Currently, there are only four directions, but as the new asset collection will demonstrate, more frames will be incorporated and more export options will become available to provide you the options, including the choice between combining the assets or exporting them into separate files.
• And finally, on the topic of exports, your Tags assigned to your project will be optionally exportable with your characters' sprite sheets. This means you will be able to automate your sprite sheets into your asset pipeline if you need it.

Yes, there is a lot of features here all needing work, and so, our schedule for release will be as follows:

• Colour Palettes - Target Completion: 24/11/2023
• Tag Management - Target Completion: 28/11/2023
• Character Management - Target Completion: 3/12/2023
• Randomisation - Target Completion: 10/12/2023
• Interface Improvements - Target Completion: 13/12/2023
• Export Improvements - Target Completion: 18/12/2023
• Final Testing & Bug Checking - Target Completion: 22/12/2023

This gives us the rest of this month and all of December to complete all of these features ready for a January release. As I am technically alone on this project with a strong focus on this in my free-time, it is possible this can be done earlier, but I thought it would be best to show some thought and realism in the target dates.

And so, to cap all this off, the final release for Patch 1.1 should be the 13th January 2024, and that's assuming our graphics artist has the assets ready by then. Yes, the assets also do need work before they get incorporated into the project.

Just to be clear, although we have the assets already for the new frames, clothing assets do need to be applied to the frames where the body parts change, so as to prevent causing any "strangeness" if you like. In addition, the new frames have not been converted to black & white and so this also needs working on. Three weeks between the completion of Patch 1.1 until release should be enough time to get all the assets ready for its release alongside Character Generator.

Thank you for your patience while we continue working on Character Generator.