Addendum: Working with external graphics
If you're serious about game development with MicroBlocks, you probably want to draw your sprites on an external drawing program. This would also let you use higher bitdepths and bigger color palettes. Here's a very short tutorial to help you import sprites from GIMP to MicroBlocks.
Importing images from GIMP
Remove the alpha channel
Right click on the Layers panel and click on Remove Alpha Channel. This will take away any transparency information from the colors in your image.
Convert image to indexed
The 8 Bit Graphics library wants indexed images. That is, images where each pixel points to an index in a palette. To ask GIMP to turn your image into an indexed one, you need to navigate to the Image menu, Mode submenu, and select Indexed….
This will pop up a new dialog with several options. Under Colormap you should choose Generate optimum palette, selecting the maximum number of colors you want to work with (recommended for MicroBlocks is a maximum of 256 colors). You can also check Remove unused and duplicate colors from colormap.
You can play with different options under the Dithering section. If your image has more colors than the palette can handle, dithering will attempt to trick your eyes into seeing these extra colors by sprinkling in pixels of different colors close together. Different dithering strategies will result in different effects.
Export as raw image data
From the File menu, select Export As…. In the Export dialog, you should look for the Select File Type (By Extension) option, and click on it. This will unfold a long list of file types, from which you need to find and select Raw image data.
This will generate and export two different files: a .data file, with your
image data in it, and a .data.pal file, with your palette data.
Import files into MicroBlocks
While connected to your board, you can just drag and drop these files onto the MicroBlocks IDE to upload them to the board.
Read back the palette from the .data.pal file
To read the palette file into MicroBlocks, you can use this block from the 8 Bit Graphics library:
Most often, you will want to set the palette to the one in the file. Here's how you'd do it:
Read back the sprite from the .data file
Finally, you can now read your sprite from the .data file.
Your game, of course, will have more than one sprite. The best way to proceed here would be to work with a set palette in GIMP, and create all your graphics with that palette.
Reading palettes and sprites from BMP files
The 8 Bit Graphics library also lets you read your palettes and bitmaps from BMP files. To do it, you just have to drop your BMP file into the MicroBlocks IDE while your board is connected to it, and use these two blocks to read the palette and bitmap out of it:
