Creating Characters

Creating characters thru the engine is not available yet, so you have to manually add the files yourself.
All you need is the spritesheet and an XML file for the data.
The spritesheet goes in ./images/characters/ and the XML file in ./data/characters.

Writing the XML file is pretty simple, here is what Dad's XML data looks like:

<character isPlayer="false" flipX="false" holdTime="6.1" color="#AF66CE">
    <anim name="idle" anim="Dad idle dance" fps="24" loop="false" x="0" y="0"/>
    <anim name="singUP" anim="Dad Sing note UP" fps="24" loop="false" x="-6" y="50"/>
    <anim name="singLEFT" anim="dad sing note right" fps="24" loop="false" x="-10" y="10"/>
    <anim name="singRIGHT" anim="Dad Sing Note LEFT" fps="24" loop="false" x="0" y="27"/>
    <anim name="singDOWN" anim="Dad Sing Note DOWN" fps="24" loop="false" x="0" y="-30"/>
</character>

There's a lot to unpack, but we'll go over the <character> node's properties first:

• sprite determines which sprite to load, if you have a spritesheet with a different name.
• isPlayer determines whether your character is a player character or not (for example, boyfriend is a player character).
• x and y determine the character's position in the stage. (keep in mind that stages can override these values)
• scale determines the scale of the character.
• camx and camy adjusts the character's camera point.
• flipX can be used if your sprite is facing the wrong direction.
• antialiasing determines if your sprite should use antialiasing or not.
• gameOverChar defines the separate character to be used on the Game Over screen (for example bf-dead)
• icon can be used if your character icon has a different name.
• color defines the color of it's Health Bar part.
• holdTime defines how many steps it should wait until resuming to it's idle.

These are about all properties you can apply to the character node.
You can obviously apply more properties and access them in Scripts, see Character/Stage Scripts.

As for the <anim> nodes, they're pretty self-explanatory but here's a list of properties of them too:

• name defines the internal name of the animation (used for scripting)
• anim is the prefix for finding the animation in the spritesheet.
• indices indicates which frames to play from the previously found frames.
• type determines the type of the animation. either beat or loop.
• fps is the framerate of your animation.
• x and y are the animation offset. (offset is only applied when the animation is played)
• forced whether or not to force animation playback while a different one is already playing.
• loop to make your animation loop.

Health Icons

In this engine, health icons have a bit more functionality than the ordinary engine. Such as:

Adding more than just a neutral and a losing icon.

Meaning that you can also add a winning icon (by making the icon image 450x150 instead of 300x150), but it doesn't stop at just the winning icon, because you can add as many icons as you like (for example pre winning or pre pre losing etc)
Keep in mind that the width of the icon image is determined by 150 * the amount of icons you want to have.

Script Event for when the icon changes it's icon state.

Using this event in a Global Script to run code for when the icon changes it's state: onHealthIconAnimChange.