help working with sprites

Hello, i am new here, but have enjoyed what i have seen so far, looking to make some educational type games with this software...

anyway my problem is that i just cant seem to get sprites to work correctly, im having a lot of trouble to set the transparent color so that the 'blocks' i create my sprites in dont show up when the game is played, i have tryed paint, tried to use black as a solid background color and then set the effect of the sprite to 'additive' like the first tutorial, other than that i dont see a way to set the sprite so that the 'canvas' of the sprite will dissapear when you play the game,

any suggestions will be appreciated or if i could be directed to a specific program to create a sprite for construct 2 would help.

Make it so that your .png image has a transparent alpha layer.

GIMP, Paint.net and Photoshop all together allow for this.

Hi milleradam37

If your knew to making sprites here is a great 3 part tutorial that covers making minimal pixel art, as well as provides some info about using Adobe Photoshop. I think the answers your looking for are explained in detail in part 2.

Article: Creating Minimal Pixel Art with Photoshop (Part 1)

Creating Minimal Pixel Art with Photoshop (Part 2)

Creating Minimal Pixel Art with Photoshop (Part 3)

If you don't have Photoshop you can get a free trial. Or get Gimp it's free. what can be done in Photoshop can be done in Gimp they have the same tools.

Thanks for the help, i would have been spinning my wheels without your suggestions, i downloaded the paint.net and it worked perfectly, and wasnt that difficult to figure out once i glanced through their help section, thank you so much! now i can spend more time trying to work on the game, and i will also try the other suggestion as well

As Kyatric suggests. You can use any Grafic programm. Photoshop is not necessary ! and saved your image als png with alpha chanel. that's all.

Ok if you want pixel look Graphic, then could be helpfull the photoshop tutorial , but I think you ask only for creating sprite images with transparend background.

I found that the making of hydorah pdf helped alot along with his tips on sprite software.

Here is the link to the Hydorah page -

Hydorah Web Site

Here is a fantastic tutorial on pixel art.

Marks Pixel Art Tutorial

Here is one more.

Pixel Art Tutorial

I use the following tools for sprite artwork.

Graphics Gale -

IconMaker - Save as png with alpha easly.

Pixothello - You can make tilesets, blood splatter effects with onion skinning etc..

Pixothello

Iconmaker

Graphics Gale

Bloodwyn