Making a character for SPNatI requires no prior artistic skills or knowledge of coding.

The art for characters, which includes their model and the poses that make up their sprites, is made in a Japanese paper doll program called Kisekae, which is based on the K-On anime art style and was developed by a user named Pochi. Kisekae has both an online and offline version; the offline version is the one used with other SPNatI character creation software to make sprites. Pochi continues to update Kisekae with new features to this day.

Many characters' sprites also utilize image editing and other forms of post-processing, such as Photoshop. Additionally, to save file space, character sprites are compressed using a web tool known as TinyPNG.

A character's dialogue, mechanics, metadata/information, and pose-to-line assignments are found in their "behaviour.xml" files, which are essentially text documents. Creating a .xml file can be done one of two ways: the old-fashioned way, which involves manually filling out a .txt file template and converting it to .xml with a Python script included in the game files, or by using the SPNatI Character Editor program ("CE") to write dialogue.

The old-fashioned way is no longer supported, so the CE will need to be used if you want to engage with newer character creation features. It's more intuitive, anyway!

The CE also has built-in support for the Python script that helps you convert Kisekae scenes ("codes") into character sprites, which would otherwise also be done manually.

Information on how to find these programs can be found on Page 5 under "Can I download the game?" For advice on how to use them, try interacting with other users on the official subreddit and Discord servers:

The majority of community and development discussion takes place on the Discord servers, while the subreddit is the site of official requests for character entry into the game. You can find links to the Discord servers in the suggestion thread.

The following is a Google Doc containing documentation on all the contributors, characters, works-in-progress, and other information of SPNatI. It is community-run/maintained and completely unofficial; none of the moderators for SPNatI have editing privileges, and being listed on it is not a rite-of-passage.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRejQBHSnenImBLUEX5qlmxdopG0c_O9uWklerYr6v5yJ00_UUcQiOvqC6t6CUeKsRAkd2769YzA67P/pubhtml#