Noir Nine Patches

These sprites were based on the look and feel of old B/W silent films.  Because there was no voice recordings for film at that time, descriptions were shown with unique borders around them to help progress the story-line.  These sprites attempt to recapture some of the aesthetic of those old films so that you can use them in your game.

If your game has a Noir or Silent Screen feel, then these Nine Patches were made with your game in mind.  These patches are suitable for the background of Title screens, Main menus and Dialogs.

Each sprite is 96 x 96, and can be easily defined in engines such as Godot and Gamemaker Studio.  Each section was designed to be 32x32 in size.   All of these sprites can be set to tile or stretch when used.

What is a 9-Patch or 9-Slice?

9-Patch rectangles are square sprites that can easily be divided into 3 sections both horizontally and vertically.  When the sprite is draw by the engine, the four corners remain unscaled while the other sections of the sprites are scaled.  The middle section of the top and bottom rows are scaled or tiled horizontally while the first and last column of the middle row are scaled or tiles vertically.  This forms a rectangle border of any size.  Then the centre section is scaled or tiled in both directions to fill in the rectangle.

Using a 9-Patch sprite allows you to create background for your User Interface (GUI) such as large dialog boxes, menus and windows.

9-Patch Tutorials

Godot:

Gamemaker Studio:

Characters used in the Visual Novel screenshot can be found here.