A downloadable tool for Windows and Linux

A character generator for Windows and Linux, using LPC assets.

This tool creates character spritesheets that you can use to create your own games.

You can find more info about the LPC project in:

CONTROLS

WSAD / ArrowsWalk
1Test slash animation
2Test reverse slash animation
3Test thrust animation
4Test shoot animation
5Cast / Ressurect
BackspaceDie
SpaceAttack
TABSwitch weapon set (*)
Mouse wheelZoom
HOMEReset zoom
CTRL + PExport portrait
CTRL + ZShow / Hide UI
F1Help
ESCExit
(*) only used in GamerMaker export format.

CREDITS

The Liberated Pixel Effort is a collaborative effort from a number of different great artists who helped produce sprites for the project.

If you wish to use LPC sprites in your project, you will need to credit everyone who helped contribute to the LPC sprites you are using.

All art distributed with this project is licensed under the GNU GPL 3.0 and/or Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA 3.0) license(s). Some art may be available under other licenses too.

Sprites contributed as part of the Liberated Pixel Cup project from OpenGameArt.org: http://opengameart.org/content/lpc-collection


Sprites by: AntumDeluge, Barbara Riviera, Benjamin K. Smith (BenCreating), bluecarrot16, caeles, Carlo Enrico Victoria (Nemisys), Charles Sanchez (CharlesGabriel), Cobra Hubbard (BlueVortexGames), dalonedrau, Daniel Eddeland (daneeklu), DarkwallLKE, David Conway Jr. (JaidynReiman), DCSS artists (see https://github.com/crawl/tiles/blob/master/ARTISTS.md), Dr. Jamgo, Durrani, Eliza Wyatt (ElizaWy), Emilio J. Sanchez-Sierra, Evert, Fabzy, gr3yh47, Inboxninja, Joe White, Johannes Sjölund (wulax), kcilds/Rocetti/Eredah, kheftel, kirts, laetissima, Lanea Zimmerman (Sharm), LordNeo, Lori Angela Nagel (jastiv), Luke Mehl, Mandi Paugh, Manuel Riecke (MrBeast), Marcel van de Steeg (MadMarcel), Mark Weyer, Matthew Krohn (makrohn), Michael Whitlock (bigbeargames), MuffinElZangano, Nila122, pflat, Pierre Vigier (pvigier), PlatForge project, Radomir Dopieralski, Rhimlock, Sander Frenken (castelonia), Shaun Williams, Skorpio, Stafford McIntyre, Stephen Challener (Redshrike), Thane Brimhall (pennomi), thecilekli, TheraHedwig, Tracy, tskaufma, Tuomo Untinen (reemax), William.Thompsonj, XOR, Yamilian, Zi Ye

A detailed credits file can be viewed in the application.

Music:

Sleepy Little Mouse by Tsorthan Grove - CC BY 4.0 - https://opengameart.org/content/sleepy-little-mouse


UI Textures:

Pennomi's UI Elements by pennomi - CC-BY-SA 3.0, GPL 3.0 - https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-pennomis-ui-elements

Golden UI by Buch - CC-BY-SA 3.0 - https://opengameart.org/content/golden-ui-bigger-than-ever-edition

StatusIn development
CategoryTool
PlatformsWindows, Linux
Rating
Rated 4.9 out of 5 stars
(19 total ratings)
Authorpflat
Made withSFML, GIMP
Tagschargen, lpc, SFML, tool
Code licensezlib License

Download

Download
CharGen_v0.7.1.zip 11 MB
Download
CharGen_v0.7.1.tar.gz 11 MB
Download
CharGen-0.7.1-x86_64.AppImage 13 MB

Development log

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Comments

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This tool wil help me a lot with my game project development and will provided the much need assets for my character generation. I have been creating my characters from scratch and its really time consuming. For some characters created from scratch can be useful, but for the majority of the sprites I will need, this generator will be better and save me time. I will credit everyone involved in my character asset creations and will make sure to include their attribution in the end game credits of my final release. Thank you again for providing this tool. You all are very appreciated! 

Many thanks for your kind words.

Hoping for success and fun in your gamedev journey.

You're very welcome! Thank you for the kind reply and I appreciate the warm wishes as well.  

Hello I'm in a 7th grade class and am curious how did you get interested in this?

Hi,

sorry for the delay answering.

When I first tried to build a game, I wanted a 3D space game, where you commanded a small ship, with a small crew (something like Firefly), where you could also walk inside.

And I soon became overwhelmed with the quantity of assets that I was requiring (models, animations, textures, sound effects).

I tried to use as many assets as I could find on the net (mostly opengameart.org), but soon reached a point where all the assets didn't work well together. Which was really expected, since there was no creative direction in the asset creation.

So I became disappointed and quiet for a while.

Later, I thought that I should tone down the game a bit (a LOT, really) and went looking for 2D assets. I found LPC the best free option, so I started messing with it.

In the process of developing the character equipment system, I started having fun and went too far with the scope of it.

It ended in the generator, which consumed a lot of time (and the game is stopped again :)).

I hope I answered your question.

Take care.

(+1)

This is awesome. Is the source code available somewhere? 

(+1)

Glad you liked it.

I havent't release the source code yet. I'm meaning to do it, but first I'm getting around to cleaning it (it's a bit over complicated).

This is so helpful. I've been using game maker off and on since 4.3... more off than on as I started using C++ and C# more. But I can see you have some DLLs and your credits generator is the icing on the cake. 

Operating System: Linux Mint 21.3                 

          Kernel: Linux 5.15.0-97-generic

    Architecture: x86-64

i get the errors that looks like i need a different compiler version or something similar on the appimage (usually that means "this will not work on this version number of your linux) as well as something about missing libflac on the standard download executable (im not trying to troll, just feedback , i know linux has become a mess where you need to hunt after and keep older versions around) fyi ... looking good tho i kinda wanted it

Seems I need to learn more about AppImage than the script I made.

I'm gonna take a look into it. Thanks for the info.

i dont know enough about it to give any kind of decent advice, sorry , all i know, like websites on browser updates it tends to not survive every OS upgrade (while in fact i think the original idea was "appimage removes the need for all that")

good luck !!!

Hi, I recently exported my first character, and ran into 2 issues

1. Sometimes the animations would post in seperate files and sometimes they'd export in one singular png

2. WHERE IS THE WEAPON IN THE THRUST ANIMATION? the slash one works just fine, but the thrust... not so much. When I export it, the arms are doing something, but no weapon in sight.

I'm using windows, which I've heard causes a couple issues. Any clue what's going on?

(-1)

windows 11 btw

Hello Da Flarf,

1. since version 0.4, when the character is wielding a large weapon (one that does not fit in the single image spritesheet), the app creates one file for each animation.

Creating a spritesheet with large weapons, would create a extremely large file with mostly blank space.

2. The creators of the LPC sprites created almost all weapons only one animation. Only a couple have more than one animation (sword, halberd and dagger come to mind).

If the app doesn't show the weapon in that animation (in this specific case, key '3') it will not be on the image.


Hope this clarifies the issues.

Thanks for the clarification about the large weapon v.s small weapon for exporting. I'm exporting a sword character. Does the sword have a thrust animation? I'm using the 3rd sword option. Thanks again for the speedy reply :D

Nope. Only the first and second (the second is the first with different color sets) has a thrust animation.

You can use the app to test this. Press:

1 - Test slash animation

2 - Test reverse slash animation

3 - Test thrust animation

SPACE - Only play a valid weapon animation (randomly if there are more more than one)

If the character plays the animation empty handed, that weapon doesn't has the respective animation.

Thanks! I'll re-export my stuff using one of those 2. This app is a tremendous help for prototyping. Thanks again!

Hi big guy, can you add some guns to the arsenal?

I didn't know of any LPC guns, but you made me look again and I found a pack that has a couple.

Unfortunetly it's male only, and would require some tinkering, because they change the walk animation.

I'll give it a try. I'm curious to see it working in the existing system.

Let's see if something cames out of it.

Just downloaded and testing, it doesnt save or export anything, including credits txt files. Besides no file format can be seletected while exporting, only .char is shown when saving (without any results).

There another post with a similar situation happening on Windows, so I'm assuming you're also on Windows.

The fact is I could not yet reproduce the error. Guess I better roll up a Windows VM to try to see and debug the error.

Sorry for the trouble.

My game dev workstation is my desktop, so usually I download and test everything here. Its a 10 years old windows 8.1 . This afternoon tried again on my laptop (win 11) works flawlessly! Win 8.1 might be the problem. I still dont know. 
Also a little tiny request, if you were to visit RPG Developer Bakin official discord channel, people actually enjoy and appreciate your LPC generator there. If you could implement Bakin sprite sheet layout, it would be wonderful!
Its (DOWN, LEFT, UP, RIGHT).
Thanks for the answer btw!

Okay, thank you. I will work hard to learn English

Hello, is there a way to change the language? I don't quite understand English but I really like this software. Thank you/(ㄒoㄒ)/~~

Hi. Sorry for the late reply.

Unfortunetly I have no plans to implement localization in the immediate future. When I get a better understanding of what's involved, maybe I'll give it a try, but for now there's other stuff I'd like to implement first.

Thank you for your interest.

Hi pflat - when creating a character with a staff, it only exports the "_thrust" animation, not the whole "_universal" sheet - let me know if I'm missing something!

Thanks for the info. The problem in now fixed in version 0.7.1.

Sorry for the trouble.

Just one thing... When the character is holding a 'large' weapon (most staffs) the generator never creates the universal sheet, but instead creates individual sheets for each animation.

Thank you!

Hi,

Looks neat. Cant get it to export to png though. Nothing happens. Win 10.

Hmmm.... the log file in   C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\LPC\   says anything useful?

Is the select folder dialog shown ?

Does the character saving/loading works ?

Could you add settings to change the extension of the sprites like "character_idle". So we can't change for example this sprite in "character_stay". ?


Also it will be so nice if we can't setup the frame directions. like first line of frame = up / second line = left, etc.. ?


You're doing an awesome work ! My project is growing thanks to your work!

Stay tuned for the next update. It will implement these requests.

oh damn thank you really !

Great update. Thanks for all the fixes and features!

Why does the mainhand weapon sometimes switch hands? Usually when walking right.

Because it's much easier, the authors of those sprites usually mirror the left and right animations (I'm guilty of that myself).

The bodies sprites are also mirrored, except for the shiny spot on the head.

If I find that I can script a solution to the issue, I'll surely fix that in the future.

Nice update! Will it ever have character running animation?

Thanks.

The running animation is  not on my plans. Even though there are running and sitting animations for the base bodies, there's hardly any clothing made for those animations.

I'm having some problems with the cloak of this tool

Found that it would have layer occlusion issues whether placed in front of or behind the character

I want to know how everyone solved it

Hi.

Can you explain what is happening, and the equipment you are using, please?

I don't know if it will help, but the chargen.pak is a zip file. You can extract the assets and check the layers of the cloaks (they are in textures/gear/back/cape)

I guided the figure and the cloak separately while hiding the body, trying to change the decoration of the parts of the figure just like this tool, but the cloak only has one picture, it can not clip the body, it can either block the body or be blocked by the body, although some other pictures can be used to solve this problem, but when the cloak material is exported separately, it does not look very useful. That's my doubt. Don't take it personally. It's translated by software. Thank you

Hey pflat!

Great tool. I thank you very much for this. For version 0.5 I see that there's an issue where you save .char with shadow, but after you close the generator and reopen it and load the .char, it doesn't load the shadow as well.

Can we also get some option to maybe directly split the spritesheet by sections? For some characters it splits it directly, but for simpler ones without weapons it just creates _universal.png

I'd also like to see next/previous buttons to work with dropdown, so I can easily toggle between different styles without first trying to expand dropdown. Or if the app would remember that dropdown is focused, so I could use arrow up / down to switch items within this dropdown.

I like the tool very much, just wanted to provide potential issues I've encountered.
Thanks

Hi. I'm glad you like the tool.

Regarding the issues you pointed out:

1. I'll look into it.

2. In the chargen.ini file, the parameter "export_individual_sheets" does this. This is just one of the settings I ended up never documenting. :(

3. I'll do somothing about this in the next version. I think the UI has so many elements already that I was pleased to replace the v0.4 buttons with the combos. But I also think you are right. If you just want to browse all the options, the comboboxes becomes annoying.

Thanks for the feedback.

(1 edit)

This is a cool LPC tool. I tried doing one for GameMaker, but it swelled to 1GB ++ probably because I did not compress the image directory... This is great for offline usage. Extra note: I am trying to import your .pak file for use in JS projects (credits included) but will not be doing a stand-alone version... your would be better anyway. Mine will simply be used inside a game for autogenerating NPC and such. Have no plans to use your sounds, music, or GUI stuff, unless you say ok to that (zlib license) and (LPC license). If you look at my waffle dudes (kenney art) you will see what I am trying to do with LPC... Might be kinda fun to see if AI can upscale LPC and still look good.... but that's for later.

(1 edit)

Thanks a ton for this!

I was wondering a few things:

1. A suggestion - Any chance you can add a counter that shows the actual H frames and V frames so we can just put that into the engine instead of manually doing so?

2. Another suggestion -  A "Randomize" button would be fantastic! Can make it great to get a bunch of random results that way.

3. Last Suggestion - Instead of clicking the arrows multiple times to find the one you're looking for, any chance that the results are divided into sections, or at least see the names from a menu or something? Similar to how the online editor works. For example if I'm looking for a specific one, I may have to click the arrows a lot of times before I find it.

4. More of a bug - it seems like the export doesn't actually save to the destination you pick, but rather it outputs to the directory above it or something.


But again, just suggestions, really appreciate this one!

Thanks for the interest.

Regarding your suggestions:

1. I'm trying to understand what you mean here. Are suggesting that the app also exports a file with the frames coordinates that compose each animation?

2. Yes. I also mean to do that. My plans are to build two buttons. One to randomize bodies and one to randomize the clothing. That way you can randomize the clothes of a fixed character, build several characters using the same uniform, or randomize everything using the two buttons.

3. Definitely. That's what I'm working on now. The arrows are bugging me also. When there were few items, it was ok, but now it's really bothersome.

4. Hmm, it's not happening to me, but i'll try on another machine with another OS, to try to catch it.

Again, thanks a lot for the input.

1. Not a file - but perhaps in the app itself, before exporting it, it'll show you the H frames and V frames - for example in Godot, when importing a sheet we have to specify how many rows and columns it has so they are aligned.

2. To add to that - having a 'lock' button next to each feature would be a nice addition, so if for example you want to lock down a specific item (race, color, beard..) you could do that without randomizing everything.

Thanks again!

are elf ears coming? Also, does this use anything from the LPC revision, I spotted the idle animation

(1 edit)

Beeing the insightul person that I am, I only saw the idle animation after I had implemented my own version. I also lost some days creating modular heads for the bodies, only to see that Universal Spritesheet Generator v3 had done that already         :(

Elf ears are allowed for Dark Elfs only (but they are called Long Ears). Maybe I should also apply the on the Demon race...

Hi!

How did you overlay the weapons images on top of the combat images? I think they're at different sizes to overlaying them is kind of difficult and I can't get it to work properly. 

btw, your work is absolutely incredible.

Thanks!

The sizes are indeed diferent. The character combat sprites are 64x64. The large weapons take 3 times that space 192x192.

The weapon is arranged in the center block, and the character image is overlaid in the center block also.

I hope this image explains it better

The purple region is the weapon sprite and the blue region the character sprite.

Thanks for the kind words.

Andddd, Time to rate this and add it to my collection

Thank you, this is brilliant! needs some polish and has a little ways to go, but I hope it gets the attention it deserves

Thank you for making this tool ! This is much more user friendly than the original generator :)

Do you by any chance need help with the tool ? I was thinking about forking and upgrading Universal LPC Spritesheet Generator but I would prefer working on something more recent. 
Help could be looking for sprites to add to the library or actual coding, whatever you'd need / prefer.

Thanks again for this !

Thank you for your interest.

Regarding sprites, I'm currently implementing most of the missing items from Universal LPC Character Generator (that is by far the most time consuming task). 

Code wise, I've considering open-sourcing the code. I've not done so yet because this tool is a by-product of a game I'm making, so it uses way too many things not needed for such a purpose (for instance, the entityX library). Any newcomer to the code would call me crazy.

Anyway, i think it's a matter of time for me to finally do it, and you can check the code.

谢谢您做出的贡献

if I make characters with this should I just say I used the character generator or credit all the artists who made all the sprites

If you wish to use LPC sprites in your project, you will need to credit everyone who helped contribute to the LPC sprites you are using.

If you wish to credit me or this tool, that is appreciated, but not required.

ok, thank you for your time

I know i may be ennoying but could it be possible to export the different stances in different single files? I have a lot of difficulty cutting and resizing it for Intersect Engine (like 4x4 chara tiles). Thank you for your work!

My first thought is "that's not meant to be done by this app".

Personally I would use a tool suited for that task (at the top of my head is ImageMagick).

Also, I would prefer to have the animations in a single spritesheet, in order to reduce the graphics card state changes, however, I'm not familiar with the Intersect Engine, so I don't know of that's an option.

That said, if none if these options work for you, I'll probably fit this change in the next release, no problem (the hide body is already done).

I will try ImageMagick thanks for the tips

I know that ImageMagick can be a bit frighting, so, I tried a possible command to extract and scale the walk animation. Hope it works for you, and if so, you can include it in your workflow.

magick -extract 576x256+0+512 female_universal.png -scale 200% female_walk.png

Well after a few tries i can't managed to resized it properly and automated them :s I must be dumb lol i will check with my engine community. I don't know if it's a hard task for you to implement this but it would change my life xD Nice work so far keep working on this beautiful tool !

ImageMagick might not be the solution for your problem, or maybe I didn't understand it yet.

That said, version 0.4 made this possible (and I completely forgot to mention it).

In the chargen.ini file, the parameter "export_individual_sheets" does this. Set it to true, and see if that solves your problem.

"I noticed that the font and graphic size on my PC interface is too small. Could you please add options in chargen.ini to adjust the font and button sizes for graphics?"

Sure. That is something that I should have tested before releasing, but in the middle of so many spritesheet preparation, I completely forgot,

I'll address it in the next release (maybe a global UI Scale value).

Could it be possible to had an "hide body" option? So i could make many paperdolls to wear my characters? Incredible job anyway!

Sure. I'll implement it in the next update.

Just one small detail... In the application, when you wear a hat, the hair is changed to something that is relatively similar and works well with the hat (or hidden entirely, in the case of helms). That will not work on this feature. Hope that's ok with you.

thx for the quick reply! I can"t wait to see the next update !

Great tool! Are you able to export a JSON format like https://sanderfrenken.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Generator/
Reason is that I like to use https://github.com/DrJamgo/Godot_LPC_Spritesheet_Gen/tree/main/addons/lpc_sprite... 

which needs that JSON input to work as intended.

Is your tool open source? Then I might take a look how to do it.

I've looked at the JSON file generated by the https://sanderfrenken.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Generator/ and sadly it would not be an easy task to generate such file.

If you open the chargen.pak file (it's just a zip file), you'll see that I don't keep a file for each color variation. I just have one file for each body and clothing item, and the color is applied at run time by the app.

That could probably be solved, but adding to that, I started this tool some time ago, and I'm using some colors that are different from the ones used by the site.

Even more, I divided some gear items in front/back images, and I couldn't now define a relation between all "my" images, and the site images.


The Godot plugin is developed to work with https://sanderfrenken.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spritesheet-Character-Generator/, and I deviated a bit from the way those spritesheets are built, which makes them incompatible, in regard to the JSON export format.


I'm still thinking about open-sourcing the code. Right now, it is clearly a by-product of my attempt at developing a game (for instance, it has a rudimentary Entity-Component-System, which is overkill for such an application), but I plan to review and clean a lot of the code, in order to open-source it.

Great tool.  Certainly makes character sprite generation a breeze!

Also, not that I don't appreciate you using a track of mine, however you have incorrectly credited me in your description.

Based on the CC-BY 4.0 license agreement, under attribution, the correct format should be as follows:

Sleepy Little Mouse by Tsorthan Grove - CC BY 4.0 - https://opengameart.org/content/sleepy-little-mouse

Are you willing to make these changes?

(1 edit)

I just need some clarification, please.

In the credits screen, when the "Music" section is show, I display all that info: the track name, author name, license and url.

Do you mean that I should display it in a one liner, and not one line for each info ?


EDIT:  Ohh. I think you were referring to the description in the page. If that's the case, its changed now.

Sorry, I should have been more specific in my explanation.
Thank you and I really appreciate your understanding with this.

Very cool if you want to make fast original sprites sheets :) a lot of features and possibilities ! good work