Sprite Designer Launch and Future Updates


Sprite Designer has officially released (out of the blue and without warning), so I just wanted to thank everyone for checking out the project.  Your support has been wonderful and I'm overwhelmed by seeing what people have made with my stupid little project so far.  

Additionally, I wanted to lay out my plans for Sprite Designer, the things I want to fix, and features I need to add.  I'm going to lay this out in terms of short and long term because I don't have a sense for how long any particular task will take or even how much time I'll have to work on them in the weeks and months to come.  

SHORT TERM

  • Improve Cell Generation Options, right now you only have 2 types of cells you can use.  In the future, I'd like the user to be able to define their own sequence of cells and how they chain together.  So if you wanted, you could have multiple cells with their own rates of becoming empty, or even multiple 'rounds' of generation, etc.  The point is, I don't want to enforce my own sequence, I want the user to be able to choose their own.  Most of the changes that will happen in the short term sense will be the back end work to make the generation capable of a more flexible series of steps, I won't 'expose' these capabilities to the user for a while until I'm confidence I can make the UI understandable and simple.
  • Lots of General code improvements to prepare for the features and fixes I have planned for later.  Doing this work in the front end means I won't have to waste a lot of time on significant rewrites later.  Basically I need to make sure all the separate components of my code are as decoupled and flexible as possible.  For the most part I did this already, but there are a few places where I probably used shortcuts as I was figuring out how I wanted the application to work.
  • Additional Options for exporting Sprites (Like individual layers, etc)

LONG TERM

  • Improve the Canvas View (where you see the sprite) with things like rulers and scroll bars.  Right now you can drag the view around with the middle mouse button, but it's still just an empty void.
  • Expose improved generation pipeline to users.
  • Improve the 'feel' of some components, like zooming in on the sprite.
  • Expand UI information so it's a little clearer what buttons do.
  • Need more editor functionality like Undo, Redo, and drawing tools (Rectangle, etc.)
  • Add user preferences to control things like Application theme and control shortcuts.

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