If it's your first time making a skin, good thing is to other people skins to get familiar with them, how they looks and how basic skin works.
So let's begin with total basic. You probably have already your template skin. If not, go ahead, it and install (double click on it).
If you don't know where to look for installed skins, check inside your osu! game directory for "Skins" folder.
"So I have already skin template, now what?" - Good thing is to make a copy of skin template and rename it to your desired name. Because if you remove something accidentally you can easily get new copy of that part.
Basic workspace is ready, so let me tell you few things about skins.
While making skin, you don't really need to stick with template sizes restrictions. Many parts can be made larger or smaller but I will explain that later in "Skin parts" section.
You can also create animation of several skin parts, with are :
- followpoint
- fruit-ryuuta
- menu-back
- play-skip
- scorebar-colour
- sliderfollowcircle
- taiko mascot
- taikocircleoverlay
- taikobigcircleoverlay
- hitbursts (300,100,50,miss etc.)
- hitcircleoverlay
- sliderball
To create animation simply you need to rename every frame to something like this : menu-back-0.png, menu-back-1.png menu-back-2.png etc.
You probably noticed that, we have different skins for different people. Some people prefer simplified skins, some like creative much more.
For osu! standard mode we have 3 major types of skins :
- Normal - Kind of skin, that skinner creates as he/she wish. Follow or don't follow template sizes. These are often colourful and creative. May contains many different animations. Typical skin for common player. ^.^
- Simplified - This kind of skin is directed to a players who dislike distractions, but need to see some things. Skins like this often have minimized size of hitbursts (300,100, 50 etc.), size of parts aren't larger than template's, less colourful, less animations.
- So called "PRO" skins - This kind of skin it totally focused on removing any distractions that skin can provide. Skins like this contains transparent hitbursts, no animations, reduced amount of colours used in it, larger "followpoint.png", semi-transparent hitcircle.
For Catch the beat :
Still gathering data, sorry. ^^;
For Taiko :
Still gathering data.
For osu!mania :
Still gathering data.