HGSS Custom Sprites?

[Cilerba]

I've looked around for a bit but I'm still not entirely sure on how to go about doing this. Any idea how to put in a custom sprite for a Pokémon? I'm trying to change Dragonite's shiny palette to pink like Dratini and Dragonair.

[aninymouse]

The palette is a separate hex file. CrystalTile2 is useful for this (and most things). There definitely are tools out there for HGSS sprite editing, however. I used to have a trove of such hacking tools but I've since deleted all my Gen 4 stuff... sorry. Try google.

[Cilerba]

I've tried Google. All I've seen are ways to edit trainer sprites and overworlds.

[aninymouse]

Honestly, what I was doing back in Gen 4 was to put Gen 5 Pokemon in over some of the older Pokemon. I was never editing the palette files, however. Instead, I'd seek out not-fully-evolved Pokemon with similar color schemes to what I wanted (Shuppet & Galvantula, for instance). I'd simply put a Galvantula sprite into the ripped file for Shuppet and edit the transparent pixels by hand (since any pixels outside the palette or too close to the transparent color would become transparent). It involved changing the image parameters to restrict the sprite files to 16 colors, I believe, or whatever the color limit was for Gen 4.

I never really finished my project, since I saw in Gen 5 so many of the improvements I wanted to make to HGSS that were ready-built into the game, instead of needing to be hacked in. Thus, I never even got to the playtesting phase. However, I know that the process starts by ripping the existing sprites from the narc file (use kiwi.ds or a similar program - I think Alpha made a similar tool and had it up on this site). From there, you make any sprite edits you want (for instance, I made a sprite set for Slaking where he wasn't just sitting there picking his nose) and then import the edited sprites back into the narc file.

Also, Kazo has a lot of tutorials on this on Youtube!