Google Dinosaur Game Custom Characters Tutorial

Summary

This tutorial explains how to replace the Chrome dinosaur in Google’s offline game with custom characters, using Mario as an example.

Main steps

1. Open chrome://dino and use Chrome Developer Tools to find the Offline Resources 1x sprite sheet. The narrator also mentions a separate birthday-version sheet.
2. Save the sprite sheet and open it in GIMP or another image editor. Add an alpha channel to make the background transparent.
3. Import a character sprite sheet, select the desired frames, and paste them over the dinosaur sprites. The example uses SNES Mario, whose running animation has two frames.
4. Flip the character horizontally if needed, then align and resize it to fit the dinosaur sprite area. Erase the dinosaur underneath. When scaling, the narrator recommends setting interpolation to None and clipping to Crop to result. Some manual pixel editing may be necessary.
5. Repeat for the other dinosaur poses and animations. Other game elements, such as cacti, can also be replaced.
6. Export the edited sheet as a PNG. To use it in the game, upload it somewhere that provides a direct image URL, then replace the Offline Resources 1x image reference with that URL.

Enlarged sprites may look imperfect, depending on the source artwork and resizing. The tutorial also shows a Sonic character swap.

Tutorial covered

Google Dinosaur Game custom-character sprite replacement, from extracting and editing the sprite sheet to loading the modified image into the game.

Main speaker and source

The tutorial is presented by channel creator BillehBawb. A friend’s website is mentioned as a place to host the edited image, but its name is unclear in the subtitles.