Submission Guidelines for creators.
So you wanna be a Pokemon Master cool dude/dudette who submits stuff to the Repo, huh? Sounds great! You’re the heart and soul of the Repo, so obviously your contributions are important.
Even so, the biggest and most important reason I made the Repo three years ago was to affect change in standardization. Before, people would haphazardly throw animations in random folders, they wouldn’t check the palettes, they wouldn’t do simple QOL, and so on.
In the modern era, the Repo has high quality standards. Every folder is organized in a structured manner. The following details will help you determine how to format your battle animations and portraits.
(Side-note: I haven’t yet overhauled the map section, background, or any other parts. That means I only have a vague guideline for them of “keeping stuff somewhat organized.” Expect this to change in the future when I get around to overhauling those sections.)
To submit an animation, you must do the following things.
How to Submit an Animation (Spoiler)
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Make sure it works and doesn’t have errors/glitches/bugs. If it does, you can submit it, but you need to include those in the CREDITS.txt file. We get it, not everyone knows how to fix some obscure animation bug. Just let us know so someone with experience can fix the problem, or so people bothered by the problem can avoid it.
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Import your animation into FEBuilder. Then, use the Dump All command to dump all of the frames into folders. Limit yourselves to one animation type per folder. For example, if you make an awesome custom animation that has a basic sword, an Alondite version, a Sealed Sword, an Axe/Handaxe, and a Lance, each of those will go in their own folders.
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Name the folders according to these types:
You can give the animations a variant name, like (Exaccus) or whatever, but inside the folders, always make sure to only Dump All with a basic word, such asSword, Lance, Axe, Handaxe, Magic, Dragonstone, etc. Do not use Dump All with a name likeSword (Exaccus FE7)or that will break my Readme-getter. -
After dumping the animations and getting the folders sorted, add a CREDITS.txt file. Inside, list all of your credits piece by piece. Make sure to double-space the new lines!
Instead of:
Do this so it shows up on the Github repo properly:
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Next, put all of your dumped and properly named folders and your credits, palettes, whatever else inside a dedicated folder. To name the final folder, there are a few guidelines I can list, but honestly even if you mess this part up it’s only a ten second fix on my end, so it’s not important.
These are example folder names in the new Repo:
If you’re not sure about Base/Custom/Etc, here are all the suffixes:
Base-Suffix: This is an animation that either is a vanilla animation/vanilla +weapons, or a vanilla animation repaletted for other uses.
Reskin-Suffix: Identical to the Base animation in terms of movement, but it looks different stylistically. Typically character reskins or heavy artistic modifications that retain the original attack and movements are considered Reskins.
Variant-Suffix: These are animations that have motions which deviate from the vanilla movements. For example, Eliwood slashing instead of stabbing would qualify as a Variant. Variants can also be Reskins, but Reskins cannot be Variants.
Custom-Suffix: A totally custom animation, such as the Greil Lord, would count as a Custom suffix. Note that there can also be fully custom animations that mimic the style of other animations. For example, Nuramon’s Ephraim Infantry is a fully custom animation based on Ephraim’s character design.
Style-Suffix: This type of animation apes another. For example, an Eliwood-Style Berserker would be a Berserker that tries to look or fight or act like one of Eliwood’s Lord-type classes.
Type-Suffix: Some animations are really weird, like the Sword Brigand. This is a Brigand animation that only possesses a sword, not an axe. Since this is technically a Sword animation, but it uses the Brigand as a base, we call this a Brigand-Type.[/quote]
- Final step: Download BwdYeti’s repo formatting tool. Drag and drop your final folder on top of the .exe file included, and it will fix your animation by cleaning up FEBuilder’s gifs and removing duplicate frames.
If you did it right, you should see something like this:
And that’s it! You’re done! Just send that to the team over Discord or on the forums or whatever else! You can also Pull Request on Github if you know how to do that; it’s up to you!
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Next, we have Portraits. These are much simpler.
How to Format Portraits (Spoiler)
Portraits consist of three types:
- Existing FE Characters from FE1-Modern.
- Non-FE Characters, listed in the Non-FE Properties folder.
- OC Characters made by the community. (These are extremely disorganized and I need to work on improving them, but it takes time to edit 4,000 individual files, so just bear with me.)
Existing FE Characters use the following format:
[Character Name] (Variant) {Creator(s)}
Examples include:
The reason I use this format is because, generally speaking, you want to identify the character first, followed by their variant. If you want to look for alternate Eliwoods, having all of the Eliwoods grouped together is valuable.
Non-FE Characters use the following format:
[Overarching Property], [Character Name] (Variant) {Authors}
Examples include:
I use this method for similar reasons as the above, but to keep characters sharing the same name from different franchises separated, I put the franchise name first. For franchises with tons of games, unless it’s absolutely important to include the game’s subtitle or number, just use a basic descriptor, like Final Fantasy instead of Final Fantasy 7 Galaga Edition Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry Series and Knuckles the Echidna.
OC Characters use the following format:
{Creator(s)} - [Character name] (Variant)
Examples include:
The reason for this format is because in the case of OC’s, it is much more important for people to group things by authors wherever possible. Characters are often also so OC that they don’t actually have names, etc. This folder is EXTREMELY sloppy but I haven’t had the time to fix it. It’s a remnant from the old Portrait Repo before I took over.
If anyone wants to help me clean it up, be my guest! I’ll see you on the Discord!
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And… that’s it!
You have reached the end of this extremely long topic. Klokking in at over 32,000 characters, or 5.5k words, there’s a lot to read.
Even so, I had to write this topic to alert the community to how much the repo has changed and what you guys can expect moving forward. If you have thoughts, criticisms, or other such things, please post them below! I will try to address them to the best of my ability!
Thanks.