Have you ever seen a blue-and-cyan robot running around your Mega Man 8-bit Deathmatch video game and thought, “Hey! I want to make one of those!” Well, if you’ve got the time and motivation, it’s surprisingly simple!
<aside> 💡 Required Materials:
First things first, we have to create the individual frames for the skin.
To the right is a very basic example sheet showing every unique frame - there are 40 frames in total.
More accurately, there are 8 sets of 5 frames - The lettered rows (A, B, C, etc.) are the different action states, while the numbered columns (1, 8/2, 7/3, etc.) are the rotated angles of those actions.
So essentially, your workload is the following:
Hi, Maestro!
With that out of the way, there are a few more additional things to know about the frames themselves.
For compatibility with the base game’s weapons, it is important that your skins are primarily colored using Blue (#0078FC) and Cyan (#00F8FC).
When the player switches to a different weapon, the weapon calls a script that modifies the values of these two colors. If these colors are not on your frames, your character will not change colors when switching weapons. You might imagine you could use this to gain an unfair advantage in multiplayer games, but really it just means other players won’t download your skin.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t use other colors on your skins, though!
To view a clearer version of this, click “Open Original.”
This is the palette that the game uses. The numbers on each color signify their internal palette number — the numbers don’t matter for this tutorial, but it’s useful knowledge regardless.
From this palette, we can pick out a few other commonly used colors.
#000000 is pure black. Useful on just about any skin for outlines and such.
#FFFFFF is pure white. Useful for additional detailing, such as basic highlighting or… parts of the skin you want to be white.
#FCFCFC is “eye white,” an off-white that isn’t affected by certain flashing charge weapons. Use it on your skin’s eyes!
In Software renderer, any colors on a skin that do not exist on the internal palette will be automatically changed to their nearest palette equivalent. Because of this, it’s generally a good idea to limit yourself to using those colors so that you can avoid weirdness.
That’s about all that you NEED to know to make a skin, but here are some basic tips and easy things you can do to keep your skins in decent quality: