Short answer: The Sprite Manager is the Sprites tab in Forge's right-side dock - the library of every sprite your project defines. Each sprite holds its frames (expressions), a default position, an entrance, idle motion, layer order, and an optional link to a cast character. Around that, the panel gives you folders, live search, three viewing densities, drag-to-reorder, and multi-select bulk edits - and its settings cog holds the defaults for new sprites plus the speaker spotlight switches.
A project-wide library
Sprites are defined once for the whole project. Define emma here and every scene can show, hide, pose, or move her by that name. The Sprite Manager edits the definitions - the reusable library your story references - not what happens to be on stage right now.
What each sprite holds
Expand a sprite to edit everything about it:
- Frames - its expressions and poses, each a named image. A star marks the default frame, used whenever a show doesn't name one. Click a frame to swap its image or rename it; adding a frame starts from an image, and the filename becomes the frame's name. You can also drop one or more image files from your computer onto a sprite to add them all as frames at once; they upload to the project's assets and are named after their files.
- Default position - where the sprite stands in any scene that never moves it. Edit Default Position places it by dragging on a stage preview; Reset returns to automatic placement.
- Entrance - the animation that plays on the sprite's first appearance.
- Idle motion - the ambient breathing and sway profile.
- Default anchor and layer - the reference point moves work from, and where the sprite sits in the drawing order.
- Character link - connects the sprite to a cast character, so the speaker spotlight can light the right sprite by identity whenever that character talks.
Folders, search, and three views
Colored folders keep a large cast organized - drag sprites between folders, collapse the ones you're not using, and recolor or rename them from the folder header. Live search matches sprite and frame names. A view switch offers three densities: roomy cards, compact rows, or a browsing grid. Drag to reorder anywhere, Ctrl/Cmd-click to multi-select, and right-click for rename, duplicate, move-to-folder, and delete - acting on the whole selection when several sprites are selected.
Nothing gets lost: Restore rows
If your story references a sprite that has no definition - say the definition was deleted while its lines remained - nothing breaks. The scenes keep playing with a placeholder image, and the panel lists the missing name in a detected-in-scenes section with a Restore row. Restoring recreates the definition instantly so you can re-attach real art. Deleting a sprite offers to remove its story references at the same time, with a live count of how many lines that touches.
The settings cog
The toolbar cog opens the panel's project-wide settings:
- New sprite defaults - the entrance and idle motion every newly created sprite starts with.
- Speaker spotlight - two switches controlling how the talking character's sprite gets lit: one for sprites linked to a cast member, one for sprites matched by name.