Making a character for SPNatI requires no prior artistic skills or knowledge
of coding.
The art for characters, which includes their model and the poses that make up
their sprites, is made in a Japanese paper doll program called Kisekae,
which is based on the K-On anime art style and was developed by a user named
Pochi. Kisekae has both an online and offline version; the offline version
is the one used with other SPNatI character creation software to make
sprites. Pochi continues to update Kisekae with new features to this day.
Many characters' sprites also utilize image editing and other forms of
post-processing, such as Photoshop. Additionally, to save file space,
character sprites are compressed using a web tool known as TinyPNG.
A character's dialogue, mechanics, metadata/information, and pose-to-line
assignments are found in their "behaviour.xml" files, which are essentially
text documents. Creating a .xml file can be done by using the SPNatI Character
Editor program ("CE") to write dialogue. The CE also has built-in support for
converting Kisekae scenes ("codes") into character sprites, which would otherwise
have to be done manually.
SPNatI offers comprehesive documentation on our tools, features, and policy in our
Official Docs Repo. We highly recommend any new devs start here:
https://spnati.net/docs/
For advice and feedback on how best to make your character, try interacting with
other users on the official subreddit and Discord servers:
The majority of community and development discussion takes place on the
Discord servers, while the subreddit is the site of official requests for
character entry into the game. You can find links to the Discord servers
in the suggestion thread.
The following is a Google Doc containing documentation on all the
contributors, characters, works-in-progress, and other information of
SPNatI. It is community-run/maintained and completely unofficial; none of
the moderators for SPNatI have editing privileges, and being listed on it is
not a rite-of-passage.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRejQBHSnenImBLUEX5qlmxdopG0c_O9uWklerYr6v5yJ00_UUcQiOvqC6t6CUeKsRAkd2769YzA67P/pubhtml#