Working with Unity’s Sprite Editor
I’m not an art person. I’m grateful beyond words for the incredible talents artistic people have, the creativity to dream something up, visualize it and render it into existence for the rest of the World to behold and enjoy. If you’re like me, you’ll be relying on the genius of others and you’ll need to learn how to work with art assets in the variety of forms.
In the Space Shooter course from GameDevHQ, we were supplied amazing game assets; however, I wanted to take this project and make it more “my own”…which is a problem — I’m not an art person. That being said, there are so many sources for game assets out there for purchase, or for “name your price” or even for free! One such resource is itch.io and I visited their game-assets the space shooter genre and found some art that spoke to me.
The sprites supplied from GameDevHQ, which you can also use with Filebase access that as of the time of this story there is a free trial, had each sprite already separated into individual files. The files from FoozleCC has the sprites in a single file (a sprite sheet).
Unity has a Sprite Editor which you can add via the package manager that makes working with sprite sheets a breeze. When you first import a sprite you’ll need to change the Texture Type from the default value on import and into a “Sprite 2D and UI”.
This will make the editor open up the Sprite Editor when clicking on the open button:
You may get a dialog prompt when clicking on the “Sprite Editor”, click Apply to save the changes just made.
Now the first time I entered into the Sprite Editor, I was a little lost. One of the great things about Unity is the Documentation. What I wanted to do was split up the file into the individual parts but what I got was a single sprite:
What I missed, was on the “Sprite Mode” I had the default of “Single” selected, what I need is for the Mode to be “Multiple”. Once selected I re-opened the Sprite Editor and from the “Slice” menu I needed to make a change from “Automatic” to “Grid By Cell Size”.
The next thing we need to do is figure out what the cell size should be. You can use trial and error here within the editor or you can use another graphics program such as Gimp or Photoshop. I use Gimp. For the shields I’m working with the cell size is 64 pixels by 64 pixels.
Once your pixels size values are entered into the dialog, click “Slice” and Unity will divide up the file into the individual parts.
The last step is to hit “Apply” and this will split the file into the individual cells, ready for use!
Stay tuned! Over the next few days my Space Shooter will be getting a fresh facelift!
