MY RIVALS WORKSHOP RESOURCE DUMP


RIVALS OF AETHER is an indie fighting game set in a world where warring civilizations summon the power of the elements. Developed by Aether Studios, it's a top-of-the-line indie platform fighter with a competitive scene grown around its roster of 18 characters.

Collage by Mallowwilds.


It's also, at the same time, the portal to a world of over 3000 custom characters, thanks to the game being moddable through the wonders of Steam Workshop. A fervent and active fan community has sprung for this scene, one which I have been a part of for over almost 5 years, so I'd like to dedicate a section of my site to compile useful resources both for those entering the scene as developers, outside of doohickey'd Discord servers.

Making a character is -honestly- not that hard! The way things are, anything about implementing them into the game is very well laid out, and the game's art style intrinsically is very accessible due to its small scale. Many of my peers came into the scene with no art knowledge, and I myself entered with no animation knowledge, but that is no large barrier for modding this game!

I guess in the end, this is just a great game to mod when you want to make something you can be proud of but also have a ton of fun with! I'm not really dedicating this shrine to convincing you to mod the game, because honestly the stuff I discuss here are already for those who want to venture into the depths, but here we go.


ABSOLUTE BASICS

  • The Unofficial Workshop Manual: a project founded by a good friend of mine, Hyuponia, this wiki covers anything you'd ask for when it comes to programming and implementation of Workshop mods! In fact it also has a Useful Tools section which I think you should check out.
  • Hitbox Helper Buddy Thing: also by Hyuponia, this is an in-game tool classified as a "Buddy", basically an add-on to your character, and loading them up in the Training Mode with it equipped lets you manually adjust the size of their hitboxes (the fields that dictate where an Attack causes damage) with your mouse.



PIXEL ART & ANIMATION BASICS

  • 12 Principles of Animation (Official Full Series): Introduced by the Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, the 12 Principals of Animation are fundamental techniques if you want to go anywhere animating your character, with a good grasp on them being particularly useful when it comes to creating a well-executed, readable fighting game character.
  • Aseprite: THE Animated sprite editor & pixel art tool. Not much I can say, this honestly just a godly tool for making sprites and animating.
  • Saint11's Pixel Art Tutorials: Somehow this guy has tutorials on pixel animating basically anything, from walk cycles to a good punch to fire. Actually great stuff.
  • Basecast base sprite templates (with Guadua and Sandbert):
  • Portrait sprite templates (with Guadua and Sandbert):
  • Animation Smearing guide by ArtistOfSeer:



MISC RESOURCES

No shame in finding any of these confusing, they're all tips and resources moreso for those already better acquainted with modding.

  • Workshop Progress Checklist: Keep track of how things are going! By Hyuponia.
  • References for "icon.png" sprite: Most taken from in-game, some from Hyuponia and I.
  • "icon.png" Guide: On that note, here's my tips on how to do an icon.png really easily.
  • Character Select Screen Skin Icons: Add these with CSS draw! Refer to a few types of "special" alts from Base Cast, such as Early Access and Milestone alts. Offsets: x+176, y+110
  • Base Cast Alt Colors: Want isolated images of the Alternate Palettes for the Base Cast roster? The competitive mizuumi of all places has you covered. I'm linking the Hodan page, but there's refs for all characters! Useful for a few hard-to-see special alts, like the Premium and Seasonal Skins.
  • Sound Test Buddy: By DinoBros, this tool allows you to listen on the spot to all the base-game sound effects from a list! Very useful, especially if you aren't familiar yet with the range of SFX from base cast.



WORKSHOP TERMS GLOSSARY

I wanted to do a glossary for a few words that may be pitfalls for certain newer devs.

  • Anti-aliasing Also known as "AA", a pixel art technique used to create the illusion of smoothing out shapes or blending colors in pixel art through the use of intermediate colors.

    This can be easily included in a RoA sprite by using a color's shading color as the Anti-aliasing near black lineart. But also, don't confuse shading with AA, because as seen above a sprite can be fully shaded but not have any anti-aliasing included. Also: avoid overusing AA, at the risk of the sprite seeming too "blurry"!


  • Article: Articles are non-hitbox objects that your character can create. These include objects that can be placed on the stage like Orcane's puddle, objects that create hitboxes when enemies get near like Lily, objects that follow you around like Sein, objects that block player movement like Kragg's rock, objects that act like platforms like Shovel Knight's Mobile Gear, and pretty much anything else you can think of.
    Each modded character has access to 5 different articles: obj_article1, obj_article2, obj_article3, obj_article_solid, and obj_article_platform. The solid article blocks player movement, while the platform article will only block player movement if they land on it.

  • Base Cast: Refers to anything from the base game, made by Aether Studios. Tends to refer to the 18 characters that comprise the base game's roster.

  • Color Mapping: A technique that aids in creating more varied alternate palettes. Also known as "smart palettes" in other communities, if two elements of a character are colored the same but you're interested in having them be recolorable seperately in their alternate costumes, you can have one of the two be colored with a different shade, and correct the colors of it in-game for the main palette.

    For example, if someone's hair and pants are both blue like ol' Feryn here, in the sprite files the pants can be recolored green so it can be recolored seperately from the hair, and in the main color-scheme it is adjusted back to blue using init_shader.gml.


  • Compatibility: Broad name for elements in a mod that can be altered by variables in another mod, such as my Knight's Dream Nail Taunt's text, which can be customized by including a "knight_compat_dream" variable and custom text in the files of the character hit by it. These characters tend to include in their Steam page a thread for people to notify if Compatibility has been added for their character.

  • Hitstun Multiplier: The value by which hitstun is multiplied after being calculated normally. A value of 0 results in default hitstun (the same as a value of 1).

  • Hue Shifting: A term in the visual arts that usually refers to shifting the Hue of a color scheme when creating the shading colors, such as shading yellow with a reddish tone, which usually tends to be more aesthetically pleasing. In Workshop, the shading on alts tends to have an odd appearance if hue-shifted drastically, which leads to many to employ Liz Shading (see below).

  • Install: A powered-up state some characters can enter that will change move properties and maybe grant new moves entirely. Installs are almost always on a timer that tells you how much longer you get to enjoy the benefits before you return to your mortal self. The source of the term probably comes from Sol Badguy from Guilty Gear's "Dragon Install" super move. (from Infil's Fighting Game Glossary)

  • knockback_adj: The multiplier to knockback dealt to you. The higher the value, the lighter the character. The lower the value, the heavier. 1 = Default value. This is usually just called Weight.

  • Liz Shading: A technique similar to Color Mapping in that its useful for having more freedom when making alternate colors for a mod. Liz Shading refers to dividing a color slot's shading into its own seperate slot, so you can change a color and the color used for its shading seperately. Useful for avoiding odd-looking shading for certain color schemes, but will take up one of your limited color slots.

  • Mixels: Mixed pixel resolution. The building blocks of a sprite are pixels, and within a medium you should make sure what counts as the size of a pixel is a consistent value. Since Rivals upscales the sprites it uses 2x when displaying them, you must either always export your sprite strips at 200% sprite size to match all the other graphics in the game, or set small_sprites in init_gml to 1.

  • Sandbert: Rivals of Aether's base template character. A mod version of him has always been available on Steam, and mods that barely change from the template tend to get called "Sandbert Clones".

  • Smears: Animation smears are a technique in animation where, when something is animated and covers a wide area in a short amount of time, it is shown distorted and "smeared" across the space between points A and point B, which sells the illusion of motion between those two points. There's a nifty guide and set of examples for these up in the Animation Resources!

  • Strip: Also known as an Animation Strip, animations in Rivals Workshop are read from a single image file containing all frames of the animation layed out side-by-side. The amount of animation frames in the strip must be specified in the animation name (ex: fstrong_strip9.png). Aseprite has a feature that allows you to automatically export an animation as a strip.