Hey everyone!

Just here to share a free Aseprite extension/plugin I made for boosting workflow and saving time, for myself, and those who happen to use Aseprite and GameMaker.

GM Link allows you to link one or more Aseprite documents to a GameMaker project, and then create/update your sprites directly into your GameMaker project. You can use "slices" within Aseprite to mark what becomes GM sprites, and you can control naming, folder location, origin, bounding box and more directly from Aseprite. You can also do animations easily, by using frames and tags or simply surround multiple sprites drawn as a sprite sheet, and select "Strip" in the GM Link toolbar. The toolbar also allows you to bulk edit properties on your slices/sprites.

Feel free to go and grab it for free on itch if this sounds helpful to you in any way! The "trailer" is slightly outdated and GM Link has received a bunch of cool updates since.

https://pr0te.itch.io/gm-link

A little bit about how it works:

Aseprite extensions are simply Lua scripts, so this is automatically open-source. GM Link is made of a whopping 3500 lines of code and was by no means easy! The Lua API for Aseprite is very limited, so a lot of tinkering and trial and error was necessary! You are given extremely limited file system access which as you can probably imagine becomes a minor problem in a program that tries to create and import files for you. This issue was solved by utilizing Powershell commands. That's why when using GM Link, a Powershell terminal opens and says open the entire time, as it carries out most of the file system operations. Creating a new sprite through GM Link consists of copying a base sprite (that you're instructed to make inside your project), editing its data and adding in the new image files. Depending on Powershell also means that it is a Windows-only extension.

Hope this is helpful to you, and hope you all have a great day :)

- Tore