Welcome

The main purpose of TheMipper's Game Assets Manager (mipGAM) is to help you see your whole assets library and connect this with your individual game projects.

Making it easy to copy and sync assets from your library to your game project.

I made this tool out of necessity. At the time of writing I have an assets library of >500.000 files. And it was impossible to get a good overview of the assets that I own. Especially seeing animations in spritesheets.
And without a good overview it was hard to select sprites for my projects. Like finding the right NPC or enemy sprite.

The current versions focuses on PixelArt SpriteSheets.

Roadmap

Font libraries - Set a text and see the preview of all the fonts within your library folders.
Atlas Editor tools - Adding a set of tools to work with the selected file. Like cutting out certain rows or selecting frames with the mouse.
Synced files - I want to keep track of the files that were copied from source to target and add the ability to update the target files when the source is newer.

Howto use

The first thing you do is create a project. Within the project you add source folders (your spritesheet libraries) and target folders.

Folders may not be subfolders of each other. Meaning targets folders cannot be a subfolder of a source folder or the root of a source folder. The program will remove folder paths that are not allowed.

The source and target folders are being shown in the UI as a separate gallery per folder. Once you add a folder the program will start parsing the contents of these folders and it will try to guess which files are spritesheets. When it finds spritesheets it will try to guess the rows and columns of that spritesheet. After the parsing is complete the gallery will show all identified files playing in an animation loop as little previews.

In the project editor under "File Patterns" you can edit the patterns that include or exclude files and folders. For example the spritesheet pattern indicates that a file might be a spritesheet. The default are files that contain the word "sheet" and are png.

These patterns are defined per project to provide flexiblity.

When you click on a preview in the gallery the selected file will be opened in the viewer. The viewer will show the file animated and the original file with a frame overlay.

The viewer also contains buttons to open the file, folder and defined programs like pixelorama. If there is a correspongind *.ase or *.pxo file the program will open those instead.

You can set the defined program ins the program settings.

If you have defined target folders you can use the shortcut ctrl+1 (index of your copy target) to copy the selected file into the target folder. In future version I want to add the function to sync files that have been copied earlier - thus keeping your project folder updated with the latest version of the asset.

Docs

Project File

Project Notes - A space to store notes about this specific game project. Like "Need to find red winged deamon sprite"

Libraries

Library Folder

Source Folders with your assets like sprite sheets or tilesets.

Target Folders

These are folders within your game project. Like the texture folder for your game.
Each target corresponds to a copy target (Ctrl+1-5)

Copy Name Strategy - Here you can decide how the program should try to prevent duplicate names when copying assets from the source library to the target folders.

Unchanged: "source/parent/file.png" will become "target/file.png". If a file.png already exists it will be overwritten.
Parent Prefix: "source/parent/file.png" will become "target/parent_file.png"
Sub Folder: "source/parent/file.png" will become "target/parent/file.png"

Gallery

Previews per page - How many previews the gallery should show per page. Defines paging.

File Patterns

The project file also stores information about the inclusion and exclusion patterns for the sprite sheet and tileset detection. You can use these patterns to change the behaviour of the parser based on your source folders. For example per default folders called "PNG" or "frames" are excluded as they usually do not contain sprite sheets but single frame images.

The patterns are PCRE RegEx. You can test them with a RegEx tester like regexr

Program Settings

User Interface

You can change the theme and font-size for the application.

External Program

Here you can define external programs that will show up as buttons in the viewer.

The format is "{name};{filetype};{command};{args}"

Pixelorama as AppImage on Linux

"Aseprite;pxo;~/Apps/Pixelorama-Linux-64bit/Pixelorama.x86_64;"

Aseprite through Steam on Linux

"Pixelorama;ase;/usr/bin/steam; -applaunch 431730"

Gallery Control

For each library folder the program opens a gallery panel showing the parsed contents of your asset folder. All files are shown without folder structure in a gallery style view. You can scroll to the next and previous page using the mouse wheel. You can also filter by name.

Viewer Control

Show the selected file from the gallery.

On top are buttons to open the file, the folder and associated programs (configured in file -> program settings) like Aseprite or Pixelorama.

It shows the animated file and below the original file with the detected frames and the active frame.

Asset Editor Control

Here you can see and edit the sprite sheet information that the program has detected and guessed. When you change the rows and cols you have to re-generate the frame for them to update in the viewer.