Custom sprites
Your own looks for people and Pokémon, the exact sizes, and prompts for AI image tools.
Give people and Pokémon on your map a look of their own: a ranger in your town's colors, a gym leader who looks like your friend, or a brand new Pokémon.
Adding a sprite
Open the upload window
Select someone on the People layer:
- Person: press the + tile at the start of Looks.
- Pokémon: press the + tile at the end of Look.
You can also add sprites from City settings → Sprites for people and Pokémon.
Choose the image
Pick a PNG, WebP, AVIF or GIF with a transparent background. The window previews what the game will use: for a person, each direction walking in place, so a wrong row shows up right away. It also checks the size.
Name it and add it
The sprite is selected for the person or Pokémon you were editing, and shows up in their picker for everyone else on the map.
Sprites belong to the city, like tilesets: interiors, live rooms, share links and forks all carry them. Logged in, an image can be up to 1 MB. Logged out, it's stored inside the city, up to 256 KB.
People: a walking sheet
A person needs every direction and a walking step, all in one image.
| Grid | 3 columns × 4 rows, every frame the same size |
| Frame size | 16×32 px, the size of the game's own characters (the whole image is 48×128 px) |
| Bigger frames | 32×32, 32×48 or 32×64 work too, and are scaled to one tile wide |
| Rows, top to bottom | facing down, up, left, right |
| Columns, left to right | standing, left foot forward, right foot forward |
| Background | transparent, with the feet at the bottom of each frame |
standing left foot right foot
down [ 16×32 ][ 16×32 ][ 16×32 ]
up [ ][ ][ ]
left [ ][ ][ ]
right [ ][ ][ ]RPG Maker sheets
Many character sheets online use RPG Maker layouts. Pick the matching Layout in the upload window:
| Layout | Grid | Rows | Frames used |
|---|---|---|---|
| DreamMist | 3 × 4 | down, up, left, right | standing, step, step |
| RPG Maker VX / MV | 3 × 4 | down, left, right, up | middle column stands |
| RPG Maker XP | 4 × 4 | down, left, right, up | first column stands |
A sheet with 4 columns is detected as RPG Maker XP. VX/MV and DreamMist sheets look the same from the outside, so choose VX/MV by hand when the rows are down, left, right, up.
Pokémon: one image
| Image | the whole Pokémon in one picture |
| Facing | left, in a front 3/4 view (it's flipped when it walks right, and in your party) |
| Size | 64×64 px is ideal, from 32×32 up to 96×96, at most 256×256 |
| Background | transparent, with the feet near the bottom |
The image is used on the map, at about two tiles tall, and in battle. The species you pick still decides its types, stats, moves and catch rate, so choose one that matches your creature. If you give it a name of its own, like Flamefox, battles use that name and the player keeps it as a nickname after catching it.
Making sprites with AI
Image generators can draw a good starting point. Paste one of these prompts, replace the part in brackets, and clean the result up as described below. The same prompts are in the upload window under Make it with AI, with a copy button.
Pixel art character sprite sheet for a top-down Pokémon game, in the style of Pokémon Ruby, Sapphire and Emerald (Game Boy Advance).
Character: [describe your character, for example a young ranger with a green cap, a brown vest and a backpack].
Layout: a grid of 3 columns and 4 rows where every cell is exactly the same size, 16×32 pixels per cell (the whole image is 48×128 pixels).
Rows from top to bottom: facing down (toward the viewer), facing up (away from the viewer), facing left, facing right.
Columns from left to right: standing still, left foot forward, right foot forward.
Style: crisp pixels, no anti-aliasing, no blur, a limited palette of about 16 colors, a 1-pixel dark outline, a 3/4 top-down view, the feet touching the bottom of each cell, the same character and proportions in every cell.
Background: fully transparent. No text, no grid lines, no shadow, no border.Cleaning up an AI image
AI tools rarely hit exact pixel sizes, and often add a background or blurry edges. A few minutes in a pixel editor fixes it:
- Shrink it to the exact size with nearest neighbor scaling, so pixels stay sharp. In GIMP: Image → Scale Image, interpolation None. Aseprite, Piskel and LibreSprite have the same option.
- Remove the background if it isn't transparent. Most editors have a magic wand or color to alpha.
- Line up the frames. For a person, every frame should sit in its cell with the feet on the bottom row of pixels. Generating each direction separately and pasting them into a 48×128 grid is often easier than asking for the whole sheet at once.
- Check the walk. Upload it: the preview walks each direction in place, so frames in the wrong order stand out.
Tip
Ask the generator for something 8 times bigger, like 384×1024 for a person or 512×512 for a Pokémon, then shrink it down. Big pixel art scales down cleanly; asking for a tiny image usually gives a blurry one.
Removing a sprite
Open City settings and press the trash button next to it. Everyone using it goes back to a default look.
Only upload art you made or are allowed to use, and credit the artists in your city's description on Explore.