Download either WinRAR or 7zip to your computer and use their guided installer. You should now be able to use their “extraction” functions on the other tools. Locate the “files” section of the GameBanana pages and click “manually download” on the latest version of the file that corresponds to your PC system. The tools from GameBanana will come in ZIP files. If you have a Windows PC and don’t know if it is 64-bit or 32-bit, you can research “how to check if my system is 64-bit or 32-bit” online. Open the ZIP files for the generator and the Psych Engine. They will contain folders. Move the folders to an easily accessible location (like the desktop) by clicking and dragging them
The assets you will need are OGG and PNG files. You can either create assets or obtain them from some resource, like from online, from a friend, or from a CD. To create assets, you will need talent with music and drawing. You will also need software for music and drawing (a DAW and an image editing program) to convert your music into a OGG file and your drawings into PNG files. There are both free and paid software for creating your assets To get an OGG file from a DAW, create your music, go to your export settings (likely accessed by going to top menu bar, clicking “File”, then clicking “Export”), then export your music as an OGG file To get a PNG file from an image editing software, create your art, go to your export settings (likely accessed by going to the top menu bar, clicking “File”, then clicking “Save as) then save your image as a PNG file If you are familiar with “the Boyfriend” and want his or any other voices in your song, you will need to create a separate OGG file containing nothing but the voices of characters like the Boyfriend or your own custom character. You will need to create poses for your custom character and save each individual pose a PNG file for animation. The minimum number of poses you’ll need for a character is two, but the more you have the more fluid the animation can be and the more expressive your character can be. Every pose of the character will need to be on a transparent background. Different image editing software will have different ways of getting a transparent background. Research online if you are unsure of your specific software’s capabilities Your character can be drawn in any style you like, however, for the menu they will need to be transparent with black outlines. Make sure your character is not colored in. For their icon they can be in any style, but their icon will need to be on a 300x150 sized PNG file. You will need to draw two heads (one normal head, one head expressing that the character is losing) that take up the upper half of the PNG file Save your character and music files to the appropriate folders.
You can bundle poses into different groups for different functions by clicking the tick box on the poses you want in a group, then clicking the “Set Animation (Pose) Name” button. To keep things simple, however, leave this feature alone for your first attempt at modding.
In the folder where you saved should now be two new files, a PNG and an XML file, both with the name of your character. The new PNG file should have all the poses of your character together, instead of separate (as you made them).
Locate the “Image file name” textbox in the bottom box named “Character”. The textbox should say “characters/BOYFRIEND”. Replace “BOYFRIEND” with the name of your character. It should be the same name of the PNG and XML files you generated. Once you’ve replaced the name, hit the “Reload Image” button next to the text box. You should now see your character. If they are an enemy character, they should be facing right. If they are facing left, look for the tick box named “Flip X” and hit it. Between the image file name box and the flip X box there should be a textbox named “Health Icon Name”. Erase the text in the box and type in the name you used to name your icon file. It will likely be the name of your character. Do not include the “icon-“ part of the icon filename.
Below the “Animations” box will be another text box named “Animation on . XML/. TXT file”. Go back to File Explorer and locate the XML for your character, then right click it and open it with a text editor like Notepad. Copy the text after “name=” up until the numbers. For example, if you named your character john, you should copy “John idle”. Once you have copied the text, go back to the character editor in the game and paste the text you copied into the XML box. If you made a low amount of PNG files for your character’s poses and movement, you might want to adjust the number under the “Framerate” box to be lower. If you separated the poses into different groups in the XML generator, be sure to use the specific group names for the specific poses you want. These group names can be found in the character’s XML file. Click the add/update button on the bottom of the bottom box to add the animation to your character. Make sure you repeat this animation process for “singLEFT”, “singRIGHT”, “singUP”, and “singDOWN”. You can use the same “Animation on . XML/. TXT” text for every sing direction. To test your animations, cycle through your character animations with the W and S keys. The text at the top of the screen will change. Cycle until the text reads “singLEFT” or whatever other sing animations you used. Your character should move, and you can make it move again by pressing the space bar.
Finalize and save your character. In the bottom box, press the save character button. Save your character in PsychEngine>mods>characters. You should overwrite the old JSON file you placed there earlier. Now you can exit the editor with the Esc key.
Your character may be too big or too small. Adjust their size by using the +/- buttons underneath “Scale”. You can also adjust their positioning using the arrow keys. Hold down the shift key while pressing the arrow keys to move your character quickly. Once you have adjusted your character to be aligned with the others, press the “Save Character” button in the middle. Navigate to PsychEngine>mods>images>menucharacters and save the JSON file with your character’s name. Press the Esc key.
Make sure the right song files go into the right folders. Separate songs cannot share folders. Go into the folders and rename your main song file “inst”. If you have voices name your voices “voices”.
If you want additional easy and hard difficulties, you’ll need to copy and paste “bopeebo” two more times and rename both copies. For the additional difficulties, you’ll need the song name, then a hyphen, then the difficulty (easy or hard). So, for example, if your song’s name is “red” then you need to name the two additional JSONs “red-easy” and “red-hard”.
If you press the space button you should hear your song. Press the space button again to stop playback. Press the red “Clear notes” button on the right. This should have erased any arrows from the light grey checkered pattern on the left. You can now edit the notes for the song you will play.
Clicking the squares will allow you to draw or “chart” four different directions of arrows. You can force a character to hit multiple arrows at once by drawing arrows horizontal of each other.
Use the W and S keys to move back and forth through the song. Use the A and D keys to change sections. You can check which section you’re on by looking for “Section” in the upper right-hand corner. Songs are automatically divided into sections and when a section changes, the camera in gameplay will move its focus. Whoever is on the left side of the chart editor will the focus of the camera. The character on the left side will change when you move through the different sections. Generally, songs will only have arrows for whoever is the focus of the camera. This “rule” can be broken, however, if your song demands it or if you think you should have notes on both sides.
Save the song in the song folder in the PsychEngine>mods>data and replace any file the computer asks about. You can use this same chart editing and saving process to edit and save over other difficulties. Once you’ve saved and returned to the chart editor, press the Enter key again to enter testing, then press the Esc key to bring up the pause menu. Locate “exit to menu” and select it. Your level should now be fully playable through normal means (story mode or freeplay)
