Stacked Sprite Viewer
A downloadable tool for Windows, macOS, and Linux
A tool for viewing stacked sprites.
Use it while you're working in your favorite pixel art editor, so you can see the stack live as you work.
Stacked sprites are exactly as the name suggests - a stack of flat sprites piled on top of each other creating a 3-dimensional object.
How to use
- download and open the tool
- in any pixel art editor, create a horizontal spritesheet consisting of multiple frames with each frame representing one layer in the stacked sprite
- export the spritesheet as a .png file
- drag the exported .png into the tool to view the stacked sprite
- the tool will automatically update whenever the file changes
See also
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Looks awesome! BTW, may I ask how to make the animation using stacked sprite?
sweeet
is it possible that when I open it it is black and nothing shows? Even dragging the .png as explained does not work. I'm using windows
Hi, can I make improvements to your app? like increasing the px limit and other things I can think of?
Hi, the source code is public: https://github.com/jontopielski/Stacked-Sprite-Viewer
If you want to fork it and make some changes on your own, feel free!
Had some trouble visualizing my player character in some positions in my isometric game. Used this, great help, thanks a lot.
As someone who does pixel art & 3d models (and both when I make stuff on Blockbench for Minecraft,) learning sprite stacking was really fun! Thank you so much for making this neat tool :D
Big stack! Thanks for enjoying the tool
Thanks to your tool I was able to quickly make this game for a jam! https://sup3r87.itch.io/tinymissiles
Oh wow, it looks great! Thanks for sharing :)
Hey, this is awesome! I am building a game at the moment using stacked sprites and this is exactly the kind of tool we need to speed up our workflow!
One request I would have is, would it be feasible to lift the 99px limit for the height and width? Some of our assets are a little larger than that which seems to be beyond the limits of the tool currently! 256px or 512px as limits would be a big help, for example! Any input welcome! Maybe I'm doing something wrong!
Hey sorry for the late reply.. at the moment the tool doesn't really support that because the tool itself is a small resolution. It was kind of built like that by design - generally when stacks are too large the engine slows down.
I don't have the time to make such a change (as it involves more than just lifting the limit) but if you're interested, feel free to poke around the source code if you want to try modifying it yourself. It's using Godot 4.0: https://github.com/jontopielski/Stacked-Sprite-Viewer
oh this is cool! could you make builds for other OSes?
Done!
Hi! This tool is really neat, but I think I've found a problem.
The sprite stack I'm doing in this example is 64x32px per frame. However, every time I export the animation in aseprite to update, your software seems to forget my settings to make the frame size 64x32.
This is how it's supposed to look like (after I change the dimensions to 64x32):
https://imgur.com/AhSBZq6
But this is what I see every time I update the sprite!:
https://imgur.com/P8OdJYB
Terrifying!
Is there any solution to this problem? Anything I might be doing wrong? Help would be very much appreciated!! :)
Hello! That seems very odd indeed.. Can you try making the Aseprite canvas 64x64 and seeing if it still has the same issue? It will help me in debugging.
You can also share with me your Aseprite file and I can see if it can be reproduced on my machine.
sure! Here's the aseprite file I used. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u8daHb1ph69-aOGNGSApMYs-eY8cgHZV/view?usp=shari...
also, exporting it as a square 64x64 did work correctly. I think I'll use square sizes for now.
Great! The file was helpful in testing. I've just updated the tool so it should hopefully work for all sizes. Thank you for letting me know about this bug!
What a fun tool! I played around with it for about two hours and I love it so much. I would definitely explore making a game with it.
Would be cool if you could export into a gif
Thanks! I'm glad you enjoy using it :) I might be able to add gif support once the "godot-gdgifexporter" plugin gets ported to 4.0. In the meantime, you can use this Aseprite script to create stacked sprite gifs within Aseprite but it's not quite as simple
Sorry to be a bother, but I'm getting this error when I try to run the script.
My Aseprite is V1.3-rc4-x64
Hi, I just tested it on the same version and didn't get any error. Can you try re-importing the script? It's a strange bug because there is no '<' symbol anywhere in the script
I will try, thanks for doing that. I have no doubt this is something exclusive to me, lol.
Lot of fun (’<_ ’
Looks so cool! <3
That is so cool! Such a lovely tool! Thanks for sharing
This is really cool! Really useful for me because I haven't gotten around to learning 3d modeling yet.
Did you write this tool in Godot? If so, how did you get the live sprite updating?
Yes, it's all in Godot. The live sprite updating involves rotating every layer of the stacked sprite every frame. Here's a video about it, if you're curious
That's awesome!
I watched that video before when I was starting out with Godot. I was wondering more about detecting file updates. I tried it before in Godot 3, but couldn't seem to get it working.
Ah right, for that you save the file location and have a timer that constantly checks to see if the file's last modified time has changed. If it has, the file has probably changed, so you reload it
Thank you so much! This helps a lot
Tried opening on Mac OS and am getting a security verification error? Is there any way around this?
Hi, can you try ctrl+clicking on the application to bypass the check? Or try opening it from the itch.io desktop application
Nice! This worked! Didn't even know about that trick!