Gamemaker is very user friendly tool when it comes to editing sprites. In gamemaker you can start working with sprites very quickly & work towards core tasks of sprites in the game. This article is simple guide on how to work with sprites in gamemaker.
What are sprites?
Sprites are graphical objects like trees/clouds/hero/villans/bullets and so much to list. Sprites can be created with help of image editing tools like photoshop, paint.net, Gimp etc. If you’re not into the sprite designing then you can even download the free & legal sprites for your game. There are many open source games that allows you to reuse the sprites in your game.
For demonstrational purpose you can get the sprites from http://spriters-resource.com
Sprite editor
Gamemaker has built in sprite editor that allows you to choose the actions of animated sprite. We have two ways to open sprite editor : First you can right click on “Sprite” folder in left hand sidebar and click “New Sprite”, this will open up the sprite properties dialog.
Second way to open sprite properties is click on “Resources” menu and then click on “Create Sprite”.
To name your sprite click the “Name” field and enter the name of your sprite. To load the graphics(sprite) you have to click “Load sprite” button. That will open up the Sprite editor window where you can set the width & height of the sprite.
Now make your sprite “transparent” so that it can easily blend with the rest of the graphics in the game. You can easily see the difference when you uncheck this option, your character shows colored edges which sets itself differently from the rest of the game graphics.
Once you’ve done with it then click OK to close the dialog box.
Animated Sprites
If you’re using animated sprites then you’ve to cautiously use the width & height in Edit sprite dialog box. so that each frame of the sprite is properly selected without cutting any edge of character/object.
While creating animated sprites you can select smooth edges option in ‘sprite properties” dialog box.
Hope this information helps.If you’ve any questions then feel free to post them here.