Make a cat skin

Custom coats, no tooling required

A skin is a folder of PNG strips. Drop it in the game's skins folder and your coat shows up in the adopt list; publish it to the Steam Workshop and anyone subscribed gets it automatically. The minimum viable skin is one image.

The folder

MySkin/
  skin.json     (optional but recommended)
  preview.png   (optional; Workshop thumbnail, ~512x512)
  Idle.png      (REQUIRED)
  Idle2.png     Run.png  Sitting.png  Sleep.png
  Jump.png      Attack.png  Hurt.png  Die.png

Any strip you leave out falls back to Idle, so start with just Idle.png and add strips as you draw them.

skin.json

{
  "name": "My Skin",
  "author": "you",
  "scale": 1.0,
  "description": "Shown on the Workshop page."
}

name: shows in the adopt list and as the Workshop title.
scale: body-size multiplier, clamped 0.5 to 1.5. If your cat's body fills more of the frame than the built-in cats (about 17px tall), lower this. The LittleKitties coats ship at 0.75.
workshop_id is written automatically on first publish; leave it alone.

The strip format

Each PNG is a horizontal strip of 40x40 frames: height exactly 40, width a multiple of 40 (up to 64 frames). Transparent background.
Any frame count works per strip; the game plays what you give it.
Grid: feet on row 33, body centered on column 18. Draw the cat facing right; the game mirrors it when walking left.

What each strip is used for (the game maps its ~40 behaviors onto these):

Strip	Used for
Idle	standing, sniffing, tail wagging, the universal fallback
Idle2	grooming, stretching, yawns, the flex gag
Run	walk, sneak, run, zoomies
Sitting	sit, crouch, lie down, kneading, the poop gag
Sleep	sleeping; draw the cat asleep, the game adds the floating Zs, so do not bake any in
Jump	jump (first ~7 frames), falling (next 2, looped), landing (last frames)
Attack	pouncing and pawing at the cursor
Hurt	the fright jump (skittish mode, spooks)
Die	the playing-dead gag

Tip: frame timing is fixed per behavior, so smooth strips in the 6 to 14 frame range look best. Chunky pixels are the aesthetic; the game renders everything at 3x to 8x nearest-neighbor scale.

Testing locally

Put your folder in %APPDATA%\Godot\app_userdata\Taskbar Cat Club\skins\
Restart the game.
Settings (alt+click a cat) > coat dropdown > your skin > Adopt.

Malformed strips are skipped with a note in the log rather than crashing; if your skin does not appear, check the strip dimensions first.

Publishing to the Workshop

With Steam running and the game closed:

TaskbarCatClub.exe -- --publish-skin "C:\path\to\MySkin"

The first run creates the Workshop item, saves its id into your skin.json, prints the Workshop URL, and exits. Later runs update the same item.
First-time publishers accept the Workshop legal agreement once (the tool prints the link).
Subscribed skins install through Steam and appear in the adopt list on the next launch.

Only publish art you made or have the rights to redistribute. Do not re-upload the game's built-in coats or other purchased asset packs.

Questions?

[email protected] or the game's Steam community hub.