[The pictures on this page are jpeg approximations of the bitmap.  To load the actual bitmap, click on the image.]

Units come in three size: 25x25 (pixels), 50x50 and 75x75.  They can be drawn anywhere on a bitmap, but it makes a lot of sense to put them in a compressed, ordered manner. When doing so, make sure their boxes do not overlap in any way.  In the Customizer, you'll specify where to find the units.

Units are drawn in two directions.  If the top of the screen is North, the directions are North and Northeast.  Turning these two directional pictures, the game will represent all eight directions.

Units can come in a variety of color schemes - think about it as painting your miniatures. Look at this picture:

Across the top, you see 24 color bars (the full bitmap has 64 schemes) each of which is ten colors. Below that you see a single, 25x25 unit, facing North and, to the right of it, Northeast. Each unit must be drawn in these two positions.

The key to coloring your units is the first color bar.  Note that each armor pixel color on the unit match exactly one of the shades of the first color bar.   Exactly means the red, green and blue (RGB) color component numbers are equal.

When picking armies in the Customizer, each of these color bars will be presented to you.  You highlight the color bar and then click a unit in your army.  Each shade of the first color bar that is present in the unit, will be correspondingly replaced with the same shade in the new color bar.  So if the second color bar from the left on the top row is chosen, your unit will effectively change colors from Ugly Bruised Purple to Good ol' Blood and Guts Red (or whatever you want to name them...)

Here's a sample of one of our ComSTRUKs (75x75), showing off 15 of the paint jobs.  These all came from one drawing of the unit.  Note that two of them aren't nicely shaded.  That's because I threw in a mix of colors in the color bar just to show it can be done.

If you don't like our color schemes, you can change them anyway you want.  If you change the first color bar, though, then you need to make corresponding changes in all the units you have drawn as well. 

It's pretty obvious by now that the ugly blue background is not included on the battlefield.  This color is defined in pixel (0,0) of the bitmap.  If you look closely at the first bitmap, you'll see it in the upper left-hand corner.

That's all there is to correctly configuring and drawing your own units!!  Most of the graphics hassle is taken care of automatically which is great news for those of us who haven't been apprenticed in the fine arts.

Just a few last notes.  The shadows are put in automatically by the game.  They are calculated by taking a silhouette of the unit, shifting it left and down by 5 pixels per "Shadow Height" (here defined as 2) and overlaying it on the field.  All field pixels that fall within the silhouette are reduced to 25% of their intensity.  If you look closely, you'll see the ground is shaded and not just colored in black.  If you look closely, you'll also see the feet of the units, drawn using the lower end of the color bar for proper shading.  Lastly, the green digitized pictures of the ComSTRUKs is a repeat of the portrait that we're using in the game.