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Devamping Sprites in Photoshop for Gen 1 (Retaining Pixels)

Tak

10
Posts
10
Years
  • Age 34
  • Seen Dec 20, 2017
Hello everyone! I just got started on ROM hacking last week and couldn't find any tutorials on devamping for Red/Blue (please let me now if you know of any). Resizing sprites to fit the GB games causes blur in most cases, so I came up with a a method that retains pixelation. It's not perfect, of course. It's inevitable that you'll lose quality when devamping.

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So we're going to turn a 3rd gen sprite into a Red/Blue sprite (you can also do this for other GB/GBC games I believe, they just need different colors to my understanding).

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First, get your GBA sprite open. Go to the bucket tool and uncheck the boxes for anti-alias and contiguous. Anti-alias will help it work better with pixels and contiguous will cause the bucket fill area to include everything of the same color (not just areas that are directly touching). This makes it easy to convert all the colors to the 4 we are allowed to use in GB games.
The hexes are:
FFFFF for background and highlights
00000 for lines and dark shadow
bbbbbb for light gray
6b6b6b for dark gray.

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Now to crop and resize (or you can crop befor recoloring, doesn't matter). Cropping is also optional. I find it best to crop larger/more complicated pokemon right to the edge so that we lose as few pixels as possible.
To resize, go to Image > Image Size. Set the height and width to 56 and 56 (presumably you are already working with a perfectly square image, if not, use cropping to make it square before resizing).
Select Nesrest Neighbor (preserve hard edges). This will retain the pixels so there will not be any blur.
You should now have a smaller version of the sprite. Some pixels will be displaced by this process. Get your pencil tool out and start fixing things up a bit (there's a little artsiness involves here). Get it the way you want it before moving on to the next step.
Note: There's no need to use the eraser since there is no transparency or layers involved, but if you need the eraser, simply set it to Pencil mode to erase in pixels.

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Now save the image under 'save for web.' We want to make sure there are only 4 colors (and that they are the colors specified above).
For the Pokered disassembly with PNG files, normal Save As doesn't seem to work for me (not sure why) and causes warnings and weird looking images when the ROM is built, but I just do Save For Web with the settings shown and it works great.

Hope that heps!
 

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