It probably won't surprise you to hear this, but I am world-renowned for my superior skills at putting together a sprite sheet. And now, for only three easy payments of $9.95, you too can learn my secrets.

When you've been around as long as I have, you've probably seen some truly shitty sprite sheets. And like pretty much everything else that's wrong in the world, it's because they simply weren't done right. The number of things that could go wrong with a sprite sheet is terrifyingly high, and so, to help you avoid those little mishaps, I've created this tutorial.

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STEP ONE: BACKGROUND COLOR
One of the most common pitfalls when assembling a sprite sheet is the background color. I'm going to come right out and say this: NEVER USE WHITE. Black is another color you want to avoid. Because if the sprite has white or black on it and the background is white/black, the spirtes will become pretty much unusable. And lastly, you should avoid using transparency. Transparent sprite sheets make life exceedingly difficult for people who want to be able to simply copy the sheet into their graphics program from their browser, rather than saving it.

Here's a pretty fail-safe method for coming up with a reasonable background color.

Here's the sprite I'll use for this example. It's Zoro from JSS! Yeah.

Now, take the sprite and invert the colors. (Ctrl+I in Paint). Spooky!

Choose one of the colors from the inverted sprite and use it as a background color. Of course, some will always work better than others. Just use your judgement.

Of course, it usually isn't so tricky that you'll have to do this. But for some sprites it can be hard to find a good BG color.

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STEP TWO: ALIGNMENT
Nothing makes an otherwise ok sprite sheet look like crap than poor alignment.

Here's a cropped area from a very well aligned sheet. [Marco (Heavy Machine Gun)]
Pretty sharp, right? Any sprite archive owner would be a fool not to accept such a sheet. But what if it was like this?

Blargh. It's an insult, I say! There's an easy way to avoid this ugliness and give your sheets the extra bit of that "this guy knows what he's doing" thing. Just use a frickin' line! Make a line, and put every sprite on it and they'll all be lined up! Of course, you should get rid of the line when you're done...

So, there you go. A nice, neat sheet and all it took was a little line.

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STEP THREE: ORGANIZATION
This is another process that pretty much falls under common sense. If you're organizing a bunch of attacks, let's say, you wouldn't suddenly throw in a jumping animation. Keep similar animations together.

Good: Idle, Movement, Attacks, Jumping, Jump Attacks, Crouching/Crouch Attacks, Specials
Bad: Idle, Jumping, Attacks, Jump Attacks, Specials, Crouch, Movement, Attacks, Crouch Attacks

Makes sense.
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STEP FOUR: USEFULNESS + USABILITY

Here's another big issue. When you rip a sprite sheet, you're doing so with the intention of making it available for other people to use, usually. Yet somehow, a large amount of sheets are simply useless or unusable. There are a lot of ways this can happen, so pay attention.

The first thing that can make a sheet useless is that sheet being useless by nature. That includes rips of things like "name entry" screens, title screens, or, to a lesser extent, character select screens. THESE ARE USELESS AND I HATE THEM. Really, when I see people rip things like that, it just pisses me off. Why not rip some real sprites when so many useful and cool sprites are still unripped? In other words: AVOID SIMPLE/USELESS RIPS. People rip these things just to get their name on the site; but do you really want your name associated with something so lame?

Another thing that can ruin a sheet is improperly saving it. You'd think it would be a simple process, but many people can't seem to competently save a sprite sheet. As a rule:
NEVER USE .JPG. DO NOT USE .GIF IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING. If you do know what you're doing, and your sheet qualifies (less than 256 colors) then go ahead, save as .gif. If you don't, use PNG; the file size is small and there is no quality loss. Even MSPaint can save png files so you have no excuse.

Completeness is, of course, another factor in a sheet's usefulness. Get every frame you possibly can if you're going to rip sprites. Don't just arbitrarily decide "ok, this is enough" and quit. Nobody can always get everything, but you should always try.

The last thing that hurts a sheet's usefulness is this: combining sprites from multiple games onto a single sheet. I'll admit, this isn't common, but it can confuse the user. Not to mention that when such sheets are submitted to SDB, I don't know where to put them.

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STEP FIVE: TAGS

And now we come to what is usually the final step: the "tag". What a tag is, if you don't know, is a little thing tacked on by the ripper that says who they are, what it is, etc. This is the part of sheet that I find is usually the most obnoxious. Here's a little list of do's and "for the love of god please do not"s.

Here are some examples of good tags.
These are good tags. They're simple but stylish, they contain all the information you could ever need, and they make good use of the graphics from the sheet to keep the color count down.

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SUMMARY
If you follow everything in this guide, your sprite sheet should be lookin' good. Here's a quick rundown of everything you've read so far.
-Don't use black, white, or transparent background colors
-Neatness counts! Line up your sheets in a neat fashion and they'll look a lot better.
-Use sensible organization.
-Avoid useless rips like title screens and name entry screens.
-Save your sheets properly! If you don't know how to save a gif without screwing it up, use PNG!
-Make a nice tag. A crappy tag can ruin a sheet. Well, not really, but it can hurt.

Until next time I decide to be helpful, this is Grim signing off. You can send me those three easy payments later.