These instructions will help you design your own themes for Squarez which you can distribute to others.

1. Go to your Squarez, Themes directory where the default theme folder is located and create a new folder for your theme.
2. Next, copy the theme.txt file from the default theme folder into your theme folder.
3. Using Notepad or any text editor, edit the theme.txt file and change the name, author and description. You can also set the color settings now or wait and do it within Squarez.
4. Create a folder called "graphics" in your theme folder.
5. Copy the squarezsprites.bmp file from the default theme, graphics folder into your graphics folder.
6. For your menu background, create or place a bmp file named "menu.bmp" into your graphics folder.
7. Next, place up to 10 files named "background01.bmp","background02.bmp", etc into your graphics folder. (If no background picture if found, then the background color is used instead)
8. If you'd like to add your own sound, then create a "sound" folder in your root theme folder. This is not necessary. If you do add sound you MUST add/copy all sound f/x files for sound to work. You can add your own pattern files, but you must include the sound f/x!

This is a simple way of using the default sprites, or sprites from another theme pack with your own menu picture and background pictures.

If you'd like to go one step further and create your own sprites then follow the instructions below.

Creating Sprites for Squarez

Squarez supports transparency for your sprites. Since 24 bit BMP files do not have a transparency field, I created a simple way of adding a unique transparency color per sprite.

For each sprite, move to the top left corner of the sprite, then count left 2 pixels. This is your transparency pixel. The first sprite is at 2,2 (x,y). So the transparency pixel for the 1st sprite is 0,2. The color pixel found here will be used as a transparency.

Remember, you're drawing in 24 bit color, yet the images are converted to 16 bit color for Squarez internally so some colors can be shifted. If your transparency was black and you had some very dark colors, it might be possible that it is converted to black. So set a transparency color if your image contains colors similar to black.

Examples:

This is the original Fuzzy theme from FrozenIpaq: (He didn't add a transparency, so it used whatever color was at -2,0 from the top left corner of the sprite, which was usually black. So all dark colors that turned black after the 16 bit conversion were considered transparent, and thus the background shows though.

In this next example, I took his original squarezsprites.bmp file and wanted to create sprites which didn't have a transparency. To do this, I needed to pick a color that wasn't used for each sprite and draw the pixel at the correct spot. There were 3 sprites that had colors similar to my transparency color I was using so I changed those 3 to a blueish to not allow a transparency.

Here is my modified BMP file. It is hard to see exactly what is happening in this example since there are colors outside of the bounding sprite box which makes it difficult to determine where the bounding box really is. Refer to your default sprites bmp for a better example of the bounding boxes.

When I refer to "bounding boxes" i'm referring to the outside border of each sprite.

I used a brownish color for most of the transparencies and blue for just 3 of them.

If your browser cannot view inline BMP images, then I have provided a link to download the BMP zipped also.

Fuzzy squarezsprites.zip

You can copy the above BMP file over your Fuzzy squarezsprites.bmp if you'd like to use these sprites.

Sprites Legend: