You can do dark er shading on the edges, but NO BLACK OUTLINES. But generally speaking, you want to be using primarily painting techniques and only doing pixel art to bring out fine details, et cetera, on the finished sprite. Well okay, they're kind of pixel art - really a combination of the two.
Copy or 'kitbash' bits of existing sprites over your outline to get a rough idea of details and shading - this part is optional, especially if you're a good artist, but usually a good idea.Place actual weapon mounts now, and make sure everything has enough room. Bring the sketch into your painting program (if you drew it on paper or whatever and it's not already there), and shrink it down to the correct size, comparing it to ships you want it to be roughly equivalent to.Don't worry about size too much right now. Roughly place weapon mounts, engines etc and think about how these will affect gameplay. Sketch a silhouette/outline and maybe some blocks of color.Generally speaking, the process most people recommend for creating a ship sprite is:.I'm not going to give a whole treatise on the artistry of making ship sprites (at least partially because I'm not great at it myself) but some important points to remember and useful resources are: PNG file with a transparent background, saved at 72 pixels/inch (not necessary, but helpful) and in 8 bits per channel color (absolutely necessary), with as little extra 'blank space' around the ship as possible. The first thing you're going to need is a ship sprite. Later, we'll make a custom ship system, hullmod, and weapons for it, but for now it'll just be a ship.
That's probably what you wanted to learn how to mod to do anyway, right? I bet it was.įor the purposes of this tutorial, we're going to be creating a little shuttle called the Bastard, with a small missile hardpoint and a universal turret. Now that we've created a mod, let's make that mod actually do something! Specifically, let's make it add a custom ship to the game. It appears in the mod list and you can select it and run Starsector with it enabled! It won't do anything yet, of course, but we've taken the first step. And that's it! Congratulations, you're done! You've made a mod! Save that file in Starsector/mods/mymod (or whatever you named your mod folder). Opening up a mod_info.json from an existing mod, it should look something like this:ġ The easiest way to get a working one is to copy it from another mod so let's go ahead and do that - mod_info JSONs aren't the sort of thing where you have to worry about intellectual property. Once we've done that, we're going to need a mod_info.json file - this is a JSON formatted text file that tells the game that the mod exists. For this tutorial, we're going to call it 'My Mod'.
Navigate to your Starsector install directory, open the /mods/ subfolder, and create a new folder - title it whatever you want the name of your mod to be. So, the first thing we need to do is literally create the mod. 7.5 Campaign Spawning (also required for Custom Production from Colonies).4 Custom Blueprint and Manufacturer/Tech Type.
csv files: If you have a license for Microsoft Excel you can use that, otherwise I recommend downloading the free Ron's CSV Editor.
VS Code is a good alternative, especially for those not on Windows. A plain-text editor: Notepad++ is the standard, free, and comes highly recommended.By the end of this tutorial, you will have a mod with a custom ship, weapon, faction, star system, and associated other creations, as well as a passing familiarity with the concepts and processes involved in implementing these.įirst, lets go over what we're gonna need: The purpose of this tutorial is to create sort of a 'minimum viable product' when it comes to modding - a simple mod including all of the facets that normally come to mind when one thinks of a Starsector mod.