Baba Aseprite Exporter

A script for exporting baba sprites created in aseprite

Requirements

• Requires Aseprite 1.2.22+

Installing/Usage

• Copy baba_sprite_export.lua to the Aseprite scripts directory
  • You can find this by opening Aseprite and go to File > Scripts > Open Scripts Folder
• Run the script in Aseprite while on a current sprite to get a dialog box
• The exported sprites will be in a folder <path to aseprite file>\<Sprite name>_out

Changelog (because I forgot to do this before)

• 7/19/22
  • Updated script to make it compatible with linux (and hopefully other OS's as well)
• 1/25/22
  • Fixed inaccurate results when importing baba sprites with color encodings other than RGB
• 12/10/21
  • Fixed not being able to export sprites with "Animated" style
• 8/31/21
  • Added the ability to import a baba sprite from a sequence of pngs
• 8/26/21
  • Fixed "character" template not setting sleep tags correctly
  • If exporting, the dialog tries to auto-guess which animation type you are exporting based on which tags are present. For tiled_slices, it looks at the current slices
• 5/25/21
  • Added ability to generate templates
  • Added "tiled_slices" option as an alternative for "tiled" animation style

Features

(Note: these features rely on the aseprite file formatted in a specific way. See the "Tag Specification" section)

Importing

Import a baba sprite from a sequence of pngs that are formatted similar to the base game. This will create a aseprite file with the baba sprite, formatted in a way that is exportable with the export feature.

--- ## Exporting You can export an Aseprite file formatted accordingly into the required png files needed for Baba Is You. This will create a folder in the same directory as the aseprite file. The contents of this folder can be copied to `\Data\Sprites` for the entire game or `\Data\Worlds\\Sprites` for levelpack specific sprites.

---

Templates

To save the hassle of making the tags manually, there is an option to make a template sprite. This creates a new aseprite file with the tags already set based on the "Tag Specification section" (see below). So you can focus on filling in the frames.

---

Options

• Animation Style - the sprite format (details explained in the next section)
• Sprite Name - the name of the sprite. The names of the output folder and exported images will start with this.
  • For exporting "Text" animation style, the folder will be <sprite name>_out but the exported images will have text_ prepended to the name.
• Layer - which layer to build the output sprites from
  • Special options "All layers" and "Visible Layers" use multiple layers

Animation Style

The animation style option corresponds to the 6 modes of animation (plus two extras) supported in Baba Is You:

• None - sprite remains the same (rock, flag, box)
• Directional - sprite changes based on the direction it is facing (ghost, skull, hand)
• Animated - sprite changes at every turn, ignoring directions (bubble, cog, bat)
• Animated Directional - sprite changes at every turn, but the sequence of sprites is determined by the direction (belt)
• Character - sprite changes whenever the object moves. Sequence of sprites is influenced by direction. Also has sleep sprites. (baba, keke, me)
• Tiled - sprite changes based on if its near other objects of the same sprite (wall, brick, fence)
• Text - this isn't an actual animation style in Baba, but it is used to export text sprites. Under the hood, it uses the "None" animation style and prepends text_ to the output file names
• Tiled Slices - this isn't an actual animation style in Baba. It's exactly like "Tiled" but the format uses an Aseprite feature called slices. Basically think a tilemap editor.
• Diag Tiled Slices - similar to the "Tiled Slices" option, but it accounts for diagonals. A new feature since Baba version 463

(Note: when saying that the sprite remains the same, we ignore the wobble animation.)

Tag Specification

The Aseprite file needs to tell the script which frames to export while following the animation style requirements. This is done with Aseprite tags, which specify a range of frames. Each animation style needs a certain set of tags, each with a specific number of frames. The specification is listed below.

Some notes about interpreting the specification:

• Tag names as case-insensitive
• If the style requires 4 wobble animations, the frame layout would look like this:

                                                    Tag
 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
|                                                                                                            |
         Wobble 1                   Wobble 2                   Wobble 3                    Wobble 4
 _________________________  _________________________  _________________________  ___________________________
|                         ||                         ||                         ||                           | 
 Frame 1, Frame 2, Frame 3  Frame 4, Frame 5, Frame 6  Frame 7, Frame 8, Frame 9  Frame 10, Frame 11 Frame 12

Animation Style - None

• Tag names: neutral
• # of frames for each tag: 3 (1 wobble animation)

Animation Style - Text

• Tag names: text
• # of frames for each tag: 3 (1 wobble animation)

Animation Style - Directional

• Tag names: left, up, right, down
• # of frames for each tag: 3 (1 wobble animation)

Animation Style - Animated

• Tag names: neutral
• # of frames for each tag: 12 (4 wobble animations)
  • Wobble animations within each tag are cycled at every turn.

Animation Style - Animated Directional

• Tag names: left, up, right, down
• # of frames for each tag: 12 (4 wobble animations)
  • Wobble animations within each tag are cycled at every turn.

Animation Style - Character

• Tag names: left, up, right, down, sleep_l, sleep_u, sleep_r, sleep_d
• # of frames for tags left, up, right, down: 12 (4 wobble animations)
  • Wobble animations within each tag are cycled whenever the object moves. This is their walking animation.
• # of frames for tags sleep_l, sleep_u, sleep_r, sleep_d: 3 (1 wobble animation)

Animation Style - Tiled

• Tag names: neutral, r, u, ru, l, rl, ul, rul, d, rd, ud, rud, ld, rld, uld, ruld
  • Each letter represents on which sides the object is connected to
• # of frames for each tag: 3 (1 set of wobble animations)