What is Merge Sprite?

As the use of premade art assets has increased, burgeoning developers have found themselves limited to assets that fit their engine. Some engines have specific restraints, whether memory or size-related, resulting in extra processing of assets in various image editing software. Merge Sprite was created to help process those sprite sheets quickly, so unnecessary time isn't spent in an image editor. 

Merge Sprite is not a true image editing software. There are plenty of companies and products out there that allow you to edit an image pixel by pixel and they do it well. Merge Sprite is a sprite sheet processing tool with some creative additions. If you bought a hand-drawn art pack but are making a pixel art game, use the Pixelization effect to make the art fit your game. Find yourself exceeding your memory limitation, use the Remove Evenly function to cut back on frames, and shrink your memory footprint.

The Features

• Combine up to four sprite sheets of different sizes together.
• Choose from over 20 Blend effects to help bring cohesion between your layers.
• Add additional sprite effects to add different effects to your sprites.
• Quickly resize your sprites.
• Quickly reshape and adjust your sprite sheets.
• Easily remove frames of animation from a sprite sheet to help fit memory constraints.
• Batch convert sprite sheet quickly to fit the needs of your project.
• Convert a sprite sheet to a series of individual images
• Dark Mode!!!!!!!!!!! 👀

Limitations

• Currently, you are limited to grid-based sprite sheets.  (Importing sprite sheets and parsing from a JSON file is planned for the future.)
• Exports are limited to a grid-based option.
• Only supports PNG and JPG files for importing and exporting.
• You can only combine up to 4 layers of sprite sheets per project.
• Windows Only. This may change in the future.

What About Updates?

I am planning for additional updates, but those will likely not be released until the summer. I plan on adding the following (In no particular order):

• Additional Sprite Effects
• Altering opacity of Sprite Layers
• Adding tints to Sprite Layers
• Merging individual images to a sprite animation
• Additional batch process export options (Creating a folder for each sprite, etc.)
• Loading non-grid based sprite sheets
• Improved (non-grid based) sprite packing

Bugs?

Like all software (especially software programmed by one person), you may encounter a bug or two. In this situation, please leave a comment here with your issue and I will do my best to promptly patch it and provide workarounds if necessary.