Skip to content

Creating Themes

This page will focus on making your own Themes, to personalise your Sonic World Experience.

Required Tools

  • Any image editor that supports transparency
    • Photopea is a free web-based Photoshop clone and is ideal for making mods.
  • An audio editor that can convert audio to .ogg files
    • Audacity is a free audio editor where you can trim and export files to .ogg.
  • A code editor ( VSCode is recommended, Notepad also works but is harder.)
  • Some degree of graphic design knowledge. (Optional)

For a list of all interface files that you can edit, see Interface Index For a list of all audio files that you can edit, see Sounds Index Any files not present will fall back to the ones in Data\Interface and Data\Sounds.

Instructions

1. Configuration

  • Create a new folder in Mods folder with the name of your theme.
  • Create two new folders in the theme's folder:
    • Interface
    • Sounds
  • Copy the settings.xml from Data/Themes and paste it into the theme's folder.
  • Create a new folder in Sounds called Music.
  • Customize the settings.xml to your liking. For more details, check here.

2. Creating Interface Elements

This is technically a working theme, but it will look almost identical to the default theme. If you know how to image edit, it is self-expanatory, just:

  • create the images in your image editor
  • name them exactly as they are in the interface index and
  • make sure its resolution matches.

It should then show the themed element in-game. If you are making a theme based on the game, you can get the assets for many games off The Spriters Resource

IF you have a problem with this step, it is not a problem we can solve, you just need to get used to the image editor

2.5 Custom Fonts

The only difficult elements are those that are ones that are multiple elements in an image (i.e. numbers, fonts). This tutorial WILL help with fonts, as there are some .psd files you can open with Photopea or Photoshop.

Download the Font PSDs here

  • Open the text in Photopea, i will be opening ProjectText.psd, which will be saved as Text.png. It should look something like this:

Photopea Overview

  • On the layers tab in the bottom-right, select all the text layers (the t with a square) using Click + Shift-Left Click

Selected Layers

  • Select the type tool (Press T). You should see the current font on the top left.

Type Tool

  • Choose a font you'd like. You can even import your own font in .ttf and .otf format. I'll choose SF Wonder Comic Bold, as it's distinct enough.

  • The font is still hard to see, so we need to add effects.

  • Right click a single text layer, and select Blending Options. Mess around with these until you get a satisfactory result, then press Ok.

Styled Letter

  • Now that you got one letter looking like the other, Right click that layer, go to Layer Style/Copy
  • Select the rest of the text layers, right click one of them and then select Layer Style/Paste
  • I'm happy with this, so I'll save the file with the same name with the project prefix removed.

Finished file

Here is how the text looks once it is saved in the Theme's Interface folder.

Finished file

Mix that with modifying more elements and it'll start looking proper!

That stupid Dolphin theme

3. Creating Sound Elements

Most people will just want to modify the music, but some may want to edit a few sounds too. For using music, ripping from the original game is recommended. CD rips and Youtube rips have fade points that make them not seamless, which isn't ideal for menus.

If making a theme based on a game, The Sounds Resource has many games' sounds available. Otherwise, you may have to rip them manually.

Sounds many themes edit include:

Name Purpose
Music folder, all of it
1Up.ogg 1Up Jingle
Dashpad.ogg Dash pad sound
Drown.ogg Drown Jingle
Invincibility.ogg Invincibility Jingle
MenuAccept.ogg The OK sound for menus
MenuBack.ogg The back sound for menus
MenuMove.ogg The move sound for menus
MissionCompleted.ogg The stage clear jingle
Result.ogg The music after getting A-F rank
ResultS.ogg The music after getting S rank
Ring.ogg Ring Sound
RingLoss.ogg Ring Loss Sound
SpeedShoe.ogg Speed Shoes Jingle
Spring.ogg Spring Sound

Conclusion

Now your theme has edited sounds and Interface elements. It is basically done. Edit as many files as you want until you're happy with it.

  • If you didn't borrow from any other themes (except DX default or legacy theme), you're free to publish it on Gamebanana under the Game Themes category.

Aside from Voice mods, theme mods are the simplest for a beginner as no modelling is required.