Despite the ribbing I get from my PSP-owning coworkers, I love my NDS. I’m a particular fan of Mario Kart DS and Animal Crossings: Wild World, both of which feature custom decals. In Mario Kart, you can modify the hood icon of your cart; in Animal Crossings, you can change the town flag. I’ve done a few decals, but they’ve been pretty terrible, and largely based on the default shapes the icon editors give you. Some people go much further. Firewheel Design are a prime example with their brilliant DSIcons site. They give you a three pane view of the general shape of the icon, then progressively fill in the details. The way they lay out the grid really helps as well, allowing you to count out in each quadrant of 16 pixels, same as the in-game editor.

Inspired, and struck with the desire to get a bit more serious about this, I put together a template for icon editing. Its not as fancy as the DSIcons template, but it has the benefit of being properly pixel sized. The template is a Photoshop CS PSD. The palette, grid and blue checkerboards are all on seperate layers. If you want to work on an image you’ve shrunk down, you can position it between whatever layers you want, and draw on a new layer you create. The palette matches the Mario Kart palette.

One caveat: in order to drop lines in the middle of the drawing box, I had to make the box one pixel wider than 32 pixels each way. If you don’t like it, you can resize the boxes.

This template is in the public domain, but I’d love it if you could point me to your creations if you use it!

(PS – Buy the classic icon pack from the DSIcon site. I did, I love it. Its worth the few bucks to support something this out of the ordinary.)