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), Sharon Rowe, Shaun Williams, Skorpio, Stafford McIntyre, Stephen Challener (Redshrike), Thane Brimhall (pennomi), thecilekli, TheForeman, 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
(23 total ratings)
Authorpflat
Made withSFML, GIMP
Tagschargen, lpc, SFML, tool
Code licensezlib License

Download

Download
CharGen_v0.9.zip 12 MB
Download
CharGen_v0.9.tar.gz 12 MB
Download
CharGen-0.9-x86_64.AppImage 14 MB

Development log

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Comments

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Viewing most recent comments 1 to 40 of 53 · Next page · Last page

hello and thanks for this tool, but it seems that i cant export any characters to me pc. help please

Hello,

there are already a couple posts with the same problem.

Unfortunately, I don't know the reason for the issue (I also don't have many info on the issue).

What's your OS?

Does  a "Save file" dialog appears when you click the export button?

If so, can you save/load characters ?

Do you have anything on the log file (in windows it's in %AppData%) ?

win 11 64

i cant save or export

hi,

its possible custom body, to create another character, or exist project in github, to contribute or custom code.

regards.

thanks

Hi, thanks for the interest.

It is possible to create new races or modify the existing ones.

If you open the chargen.pak file (it is a zip file) you can see how everything is defined in json files, and all the used textures.

Also, if you create a "data" folder in the app folder, and unzip the contents of the pak file to this folder, the app uses the lose files instead of the single archive.

This way anyone can try to add/modify things in the app.

I never wrote a guide detailing the process of creating a new race, but, for now, by checking the existing ones, and some patience, you can modify almost everything in the characters.

I haven't published the code to github yet. In the past the code was a bit messy and I wanted to clean it first. After I did clean it, I started building on it, trying to build a working game prototype. I think it now needs to be simplified a lot. Otherwise it would be a game engine (a simple game engine) and a demo application.

Time will tell.

thanks, for your response and time :)

This tool is awesome. It has saved me so much time. Thank you.

One thing I have noticed, when using the die animation the goblins head disapears. 

I'm looking forward to any future updates.

Thank you for using the app, and even more for liking it.

The original goblin head I used had no die animation. I just rechecked and it is now done. I'll include it in next update.

also meant to ask if this can be exported to RPG maker MZ? thnx!

Since v0.7 you can define the layout of the exported spritesheets.

It requires some configuration but it is working.

The base for that feature was RPGMaker (although I don't know if it was RPGMaker MZ), so maybe you're already covered.

Please see the v0.7 notes carefully, and check if this is what you need.

this is an awesome lil tool you've made here! i was jus curious tho as to how you change the direction the sprite is facing? also does it have other animations like dying hurt etc.? 

Sorry for tooking so long to reply.

Glad you liked the app so far.

Does the arrow keys or WSAD doesn't work for you? Or am I misunderstanding you ?

The animations implemented are walk, slash, thrust, shoot, cast, die. (you can test the animations with the keys 1-5, and backspace (use 5 to came back to life). You can check the keys in the initial app page in itch.io, or by pressing F1 in the app.

Can it use  to generate more assets in Stable Diffusion or ComfyUI? Just like Krita, it is even more well-known after supporting AI painting

If you are asking if it is possible to integrate some kind of AI image generation in this app, I don't even know where to start. It was never in the goals of the app.

If you are asking if you can use the images obtained with this app as a base to create new images with a AI algorithm, I truly don't know.... I got all these assets from opengameart.org, and they are very mindfull regarding how their assets are credited.

Best check the rules in opengameart.org, and when in doubt credit everyone.

Hope I answered you question.

is it possible to add custom face by loading an image from disk?

I guess it is possible, but it would be a convoluted proccess.

First you would need to create the image, with the some colors already used on the body images (that's where current heads take their color from).

Then you would need to create a new race to use that head.

It doesn'd seem difficult, and is certainly doable, but there's so much details that anyone would get many, many errors until it would be done.

Depending on avaliable time, I'll try to think on something for future versions.

Olá, primeiramente parabéns pelo projeto, ele é incrível.

Gostaria de saber se vocês implementarão animações para o personagem correndo?

E estou tendo um problema para exportar os sprites...

Quando clico para exportar, simplesmente não salva nada, nenhum tipo de arquivo é gerado. 

Thank you very much. Appreciated.

Regarding the running animations. short answer is: sadly no.

There is a project by Death's Darling, called LPC Revised that has running, climbing and sitting animations. Unfortunately, even thought there's plenty clothing options in LPC Revised, there's not as many as I gathered here. Most important, the clothing is not 100% compatible with my version of LPC, and I'm not planning to mass convert so many assets as I have done already.

Regarding the export problem, I'm at a loss here. If you run the app from a command prompt, does the program writes any error messages ?

(+1)

Hello,

I'm trying to run the program on windows 11, but I can't open the application. The error message says it's missing some .dll files

Hmmm, I staticaly link all the libraries (except the one included in the zip) to avoid these kind of problems....

Maybe you don't have the C++ runtime I used to build the app.

I builded it with Visual Studio 2015. Do you have this runtime version installed ?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=48145

hello, wow, you program is awesome, thank you! I want to maybe use the bits randomly is there a table of compatibility? so, like having a different head on a human? anyway, i really am looking for an owl to use in my game, but can't find one, any chance of that being included? also, i saw something super similarthat was going to be an addon in godot....

Hello, glad you liked the app.

Every race defined in the generator doesn't use all possible combinations of body and heads because I thought that it looked weird (for example, a skinny minotaur). However, by editing the race files (*.race) that can be done (Hope I understood your question).

Regarding the owl head, I haven't found any yet. If I do, I'll gladly add new race for it.

Also, the Godot Addon sure is a sweet piece of work. Playing With Godot might took some inspiration from this app, but it stands on it's own now and you can only praise his work.

Thank you for your work! Can I contribute to the development of the project?

I used this tool to participate in the Game Jam
https://itch.io/jam/godot-wild-jam-71/rate/2836959#post-10376906

How do I set the program to always output large images??? When I was adjusting my weapon to a sword, the output turned into a bunch of bits and pieces, which didn't work

It's being worked on. Stay tunned for next update.

Is it done? Mind sharing a source to contribute to?

Ok found it in .ini
For anyone wondering, you should set "export_large_sheets" to "always"

Hello Pflat,

Your work is amazing. Just created an account to tell you that and to ask a question.


It seems some animations cannot be exported. E.g. there's a whip animation, and I can see that it works in the UI by pressing space. The whip anim is special, and it's not exported. In fact, we cannot build any character with special animations (read as: I might be wrong, but i haven't found a way).

In an attempt to find a way, when looking at the *.export files, the animations are referenced by some string-ID that appears to be hard-coded in the source. I.e. "ISL_UP_0" likely stands for the islash animation.  As such it is hard for me to figure out whether there is a corresponding string-ID for the character_large_whip.anim that I can use to set up my .export file, without decompiling the whole app. 

For what it's worth, I tried my luck and included the following part in my export:


{
        "name": "whip",
        "suffix": "whip",
        "type": "single",
        "frames":
        [
            [ "LWP_UP_0", "LWP_UP_1", "LWP_UP_2", "LWP_UP_3", "LWP_UP_4", "LWP_UP_5", "LWP_UP_6", "LWP_UP_7" ],
            [ "LWP_LF_0", "LWP_LF_1", "LWP_LF_2", "LWP_LF_3", "LWP_LF_4", "LWP_LF_5", "LWP_LF_6", "LWP_LF_7" ],
            [ "LWP_DN_0", "LWP_DN_1", "LWP_DN_2", "LWP_DN_3", "LWP_DN_4", "LWP_DN_5", "LWP_DN_6", "LWP_DN_7" ],
            [ "LWP_RI_0", "LWP_RI_1", "LWP_RI_2", "LWP_RI_3", "LWP_RI_4", "LWP_RI_5", "LWP_RI_6", "LWP_RI_7" ]
        ]
    },

But that just crashes the application on startup, because I totally made up that "LWP_..." part and it probably doesn't exist.

So my question is: If such a string-ID exists, as a temporary workaround, I would greatly appreciate it if you tell me so. 

As a long-term fix, maybe you have any ideas on how we could solve the export of special animations generally?


Kind Regards,TS

Hello TS,

I checked the issue, and the bug is really on me. I didn't include the special animations when I rewrote the export process in v0.7

Sorry for the trouble.

That way, there's no quick fix for the problem, except to implement it. I'm already doing it and expect to release it this week.

On another note, it's amazing that you explored the app data files and experimented with it. That was really cool. Thanks a lot.

Love the tool! Just stopping by to make a quick request. Could you possible add some elf ears to the generator? There are a ton of them out there, it'd be great to be able to make some elves!

Great editor. Helps me a lot with prototyping. If you ever release the code, I will be glad to help. 

(2 edits)

I see when exporting large weapons it splits the image into different animations. Is there a way to export all images like that without having to have a big weapon?

(-1)

Yes there is.

The ini file has a setting named "export_individual_sheets". Set it to "true".

Thanks for trying the application.

Deleted 117 days ago
(1 edit)

One more question about exporting, is there a way to export every file spaced out like how large weapons are? When you export with these it puts a lot of space around each sprite, compared to normal weapons which there is no extra space. However, when importing them into the game all this extra space throws everything off. If I could export every file with this extra space it would solve the problem. Is there any way to do this?

Hmmm,  sorry I hadn't considered that requirement.

I will implement that option in the next update.

Awesome, thanks!

Good job! Thanks for your efforts!

This is really cool. Keep it up :)

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!

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