StuffGEN - object maker, made with C2

Hi, all!

I have been working on a way to create either temp or actual usable sprites quickly. What if we could place preset parts onto a grid and quickly, using the keyboard manipulate them. Change their position, size, color, even angle. From this idea StuffGEN was born.

You can see a video of it in action here - I built a system that shows what keys are being pressed and what mouse clicks are taking place so you can already learn the basics as you watch:

Thanks to Burvey and TiAm some new features were added (such as opacity on number keys 1-0) and, certainly I need to thank R0J0hound for being mega-patient with all sorts of technical questions.

From humble beginnings it has grown into something less humble - there are now 112 tiles to pick from, it can actually export a neat, clean transparent background PNG of only the sprite, you can even save and load object files that allow for returning to previous work AND merging of objects. You also get a neat help screen with instructions:

Now it has reached the fourth inner generation and I'd like to open it to a wider audience to get some more feedback, so here it is:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... index.html

Best approach is to Ctrl+Mouse Wheel zoom so it's of usable size - the exported image file will always be 512x512px for now. You can resize those inside the C2 editor or whereever.

Known issues:

Because of the way C2 works with layers currently one can only send a part to either the top or the bottom of the layer.

There's no undo or redo - save often if you want to stay safe.

Upon export some tiles gain unnecessary lines on their sides - guess it's a side effect of C2's image optimization.

At least on my setup tiles that become smaller than a certain size (say, 64 pixels) on one side automatically become greatly reduced in their inner resolution and thus very pixellated.

Selection is a bit unwieldy as it is, but I'm hoping to fix this in a future version.

Future plans:

Undo, perhaps Redo.

Decent selection system, as expected from an editor (for now select with left clicks, deselect with X).

Ability to change the canvas size as necessary.

Tilesets (this has been made forward-compatible in the save system so, hopefully, the files should work in the future).

Here are some ready-made objects to get you started:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... Robot.json

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... rShip.json

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... /Tank.json

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... yborg.json

This is the (ugly) ship I build in the demo video:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... /Ship.json

Have fun and, please, share your creations, feedback with ideas for different tiles, features, etc. This won't be available forever so if it seems interesting please do give it a try.

NOTE: There is a good chance that the tileset will change so please don't get too attached to your creations if you save them as JSON.

Hey Somebody, this looks fantastic! Looks like you put quite a bit of time on it! I will give it a try but keep up the awesome work!

Too cool. This is really looking better and better.

This is an awesome tool for beginner artists who want a consistent art style!

I wonder... using your tool could you export a sprite and add it to the tool dynamically as a new object?

This is an awesome tool for beginner artists who want a consistent art style!

I wonder... using your tool could you export a sprite and add it to the tool dynamically as a new object?

Thanks for the kind words. The system is based on frames of an animation and the save system is based on that - so outside resources would either not show or break the loaded files. This could be added for quick temp shapes (which would be ignored when saving).

If this were to take off in some way to justify the time I suspect there would be a way to make two different save files - one with just the data and another with data+images.

Currently I'm working on getting to those objects below which is the biggest hurdle for smooth editing. After the base functions are done I might look into this option.

Wow! This is really cool!

Examples of what I've made so far (some using older versions of StuffGEN). From top left, An example of a room for a point and click game, an example title screen or icon image, some sci-fi sabers, an enemy fighter, a sample alien cut screen image, a children's robot, a cute panda using only one of StuffGENs many shapes (a circle), a children's train made in under 2 minutes using only 3 basic shapes (circle, square and triangle), and an enemy mini-boss ship.

[attachment=1:24j7ucb1][/attachment:24j7ucb1]

A cartoon frog that I made. I still need to work on the feet (So happy that you added a save file system!).

[attachment=0:24j7ucb1][/attachment:24j7ucb1]

Burvey

Love it! It's a interesting approach, building all your objects out of a limited set of simple parts. As TheWyrm said, it's an easy way to get a 'consistent' art style.

Thanks TiAm, yeah, I really enjoy playing around with the program. I'm excited to give the newest version a try once I get some free time.

Great idea! Frog is very pretty.

Hi, all, thanks for the positive feedback and the amazing(really) frog Burvey

So, Z ordering is tough, but I spent some time and got the next best thing in - iterating through your selection. It behaves a little different than in usual graphics apps, but is still quite useful: You click an object and if there are other objects under your click you can move through them with tab. To make the selected object more obvious they now jitter with excitement when picked (check out the Select all at the end):

Also implemented a much more sensible deselection by simply clicking outside of an object. The top link has been updated, if you don't get these features hard refresh (Ctrl+F5... possibly a couple of times). Enjoy!

Hopefully we get to see more objects soon.

I truly love it when Construct2 makers build Apps instead of games.

Pushing boundaries and all that jazz.

Compliments on this one!

Thanks, Savvy001 - once you get the hang of it you can create some rather neat things, like my new avatar:

And it should only get better.

Another neat thing is - you make it, you save it - it's all just objects, splitting it into parts is a snap and you can use it with something like Spriter, for example.

Awesome!

I really like where this is going.

Maybe u can do a spoken video tutorial on it for youtube some day?

I would like to watch that.

I'll think about it, might help people learn it quicker.

My initial plan for it was to basically make sketches "ready for use" - as I have a good bunch of sketches of different tech and I was initially going to build everything in 3D and then render it out. This turned out being time consuming and cumbersome and, as is often the case, when building something separately changes in look and feel tend to crop up. So StuffGEN was built to help with that - you have an idea, either keep it in your head or better yet sketch it out:

Well, this is cute, but no game asset, so I can just go into StuffGEN and create a clean, precise game-ready asset in a couple of minutes:

It's a little rough because of graphics card shenanigans, but resize it to game size and it's good to go.

And should I need to tweak something (make, for example, a 2nd ship with different weapons) it's easy as pie. Soon there should be a feature that lets you select all elements of the same color so changing color schemes will be a snap.

Need an evil twin for our craft? POW!