Sega Character & Animation Tool

Sega Character & Animation Tool
System(s): Sega Mega Drive
Developer: Interactive Designs
Development timeframe: 1991
Number of players: 1

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The Sega Character & Animation Tool (SCAT), also known as the Sega Character Editor (SCE) and Sega Graphic Editor (SGE), is an internal Sega Genesis development cartridge produced by Sega of America. Utilized by the company's first and third-party development teams, it acted as a digitization and animation system, and was part of a larger initiative to grow a stable of Western development for the newly-introduced platform's 16-bit graphic capabilities.

Description

“	The Sega Character and Animation Tool (SCAT) was designed to process imagescreated in commercial paint programs into character blocks or tiles. These character blocks can be used to build maps for the game play field or sprites to create animation sequences. Although it has some character editing capabilities, it is not intended to be a drawing program. Many artists are severely restricted by character editors because they are expected to create their art in these editors. Although art created in these editors make programmers very happy (because it is generally compact and efficient), the art suffers from having to spawn a picture from an 8 by 8 pixel seed. A character block, in general, is a very difficult concept for most people to understand. However, most people can understand taking a picture and breaking it up into little 8 by 8 squares such as a puzzle. Once broken up into little pieces, it is easier to find duplicate or redundant pieces because the computer can do this best. Finally, the character set can be reduced further by looking for close matches. This is the premise for the SCAT, to make the character blocks as transparent as possible for as long as possible. Initially the maps or animation frames can be created directly from the images created in the paint program. Each time an image is placed into the map or sprite editor, it is broken into character blocks and placed in a character set. But unless the character set or character editor is selected, this is transparent to the user. The user still sees only the map and the image used to create the map. The character editor is a tool to help translate the images created in the paint program into the Genesis. The artist does have a responsibility to create the images in the paint program with some forethought of creating images that can easily be duplicated throughout the map or sprite. They should also be aware of the character count when adding images to the map. But the artist would have to deal with this regardless of the technique used to create the art. SCAT is actually two editors in one --an editor to create a map and an editor to create sprite animation. Both editors utilize DPaint pictures, brushes or PCX format pictures. These externally created images/pictures are independently loaded and stored in their original form through the Image options in either mode.	„
— Sega Character & Animation Tool 2.0 documentation

Production credits

• Documentation: Dan Cavina

Source:

Developer statements

List of developed games

• Monster Hunter (unreleased)
• Relentless (unreleased)

Documentation

File:SegaCharacterAnimationTool MD US v2 documentation.txt

Version 2.0

File:SegaCharacterAnimationTool MD US v2 documentation.txt