Making ASCII art for CDDA

ASCII art Editors

ASCII art can be made using any text editor, such as Notepad, but it’s more convenient to use an editor created for making ASCII art. There are many ASCII art editors on the internet, but this guide focuses on REXPaint because aside from many useful features like drawing ellipses, rectangles, lines and other shapes, it’s the only editor with the option to export images to a format readable by CDDA. Note that this is not a comprehensive REXPaint manual, you can find the full manual here or in your REXPaint folder.

Installing REXPaint

  1. Download REXPaint here and unzip the folder. Note: in version 1.50 colors yellow and pink were not exported correctly. This has been fixed in version 1.60.
  2. Download CDDA color palette here and put in the palettes folder. Change the palette in REXPaint to “CDDA” palette using [ and ] buttons. You can sort the colors nicely by pressing Ctrl-Shift-o.
  3. Download unifont font (the font used in CDDA) here. Put it into the data/fonts folder and paste the following line at the bottom of _config.xt file: "unifont 8x16" unifont_8x16 16 16 unifont_8x16 16 16 _utf8 _mirror 1 // 640x960. You can change the font in REXPaint by pressing Ctrl-wheel.

    Drawing

    Now you can draw your art. It’s strongly advised to check the manual for descriptions of all tools. Note that art for CDDA can’t be wider than 41 characters, therefore it’s advised to set defaultImageWidth to 41 in REXPaint.cfg. If you use different colors than those found in CDDA palette, they’ll be exported as white.

    Exporting

    Once you’ve finished making your art you can export it by pressing Ctrl-j. This will produce a text file ready to be pasted into the corresponding [ITEM_CATEGORY]_ascii.json or [BODY_PART]_graph.json in the data/json/ascii_art or data/json/bodypart_graphs folders, respectively, complete with color tags. Make sure that the canvas isn’t wider that 41 characters (or 40 characters for body graphs) before exporting. For more information about adding your art to the game read JSON_INFO.md.