tools
- B
- Pencil
- E
- Erase, or right-click with any tool
- G
- Flood fill
- L
- Line
- U
- Rectangle
- C
- Ellipse
- I
- Pick a color off the canvas, or alt-click
- O
- Set the origin
- S
- Select a region: drag to mark it, drag inside to move it
the selection
- CtrlA
- Select the whole frame
- Esc
- Drop the selection. So does picking another tool
- CtrlC
- Copy the selected pixels
- CtrlX
- Cut them
- CtrlV
- Paste at the selection's corner, or the frame's
- Del
- Clear them, leaving transparent
- ←↑↓→
- Move the selection a pixel
The clipboard holds pixels rather than a rectangle: pasting puts
the colored cells down and leaves whatever is under the
transparent ones. It survives changing frame, changing sprite
and changing tool, so a hand drawn once can go on every facing.
Moving something off the edge loses what goes over: the
arrows wrap the whole frame, but a selection does not.
frames
- [ ]
- Previous / next frame
- Shift[ ]
- Move this frame earlier / later, or drag it in the sheet strip
- Space
- Play / pause
- hold
- How many beats of the frame rate this frame stays up.
1 is an even animation; the sheet strip marks anything more with
×n. It's in the .forge file and nowhere else, and so is the
frame rate, because no export target takes one.
- ←↑↓→
- Nudge the whole drawing a pixel, wrapping at the edge. With a selection up they move that instead
- H V
- Flip this frame across the vertical / horizontal
- R
- Turn the whole sprite 90° clockwise: every frame, and the frame size with them. A 16×24 becomes a 24×16 and the origin goes with it.
view
- − =
- Zoom out / in
- D
- Pixel grid
- M
- Mirror across the vertical center
- N
- Onion skin: ghosts of the frames either side of this one,
rose for the ones behind and cyan for the ones ahead. It wraps, so the
last frame ghosts against the first.
- ShiftN
- How far the ghosts reach, 1 to 4 each way.
They fade with distance, and a frame is never ghosted twice however deep
you wind it.
project
- CtrlN
- New
- CtrlO
- Open a .forge project
- CtrlS
- Save. Add Shift for Save As
- T
- Character templates
- CtrlZ
- Undo. Add Shift to redo
the origin
The point the game positions a sprite by: the feet, for
someone walking. It's kept in the .forge file and handed to the
loader at run time. It's never written into a PNG, so every
engine reading a sheet has to be told it separately.
the two files
A .forge file is the whole project: every sprite,
the one shared palette, the origins and the frame rates. It is
JSON, and deliberately readable in a diff. A PNG
sheet is only pixels: a uniform grid of
frame-width by frame-height cells, counted left to right, then
top to bottom.
one palette
Every sprite in a project draws from the same swatches, so a
character's eight facings cannot drift onto eight slightly
different browns. REPLACE and a theme both follow that palette
across every sprite. The .forge key names at most 89 colors; go
over and saving offers to merge the least-used into their
nearest neighbors.