I've wrapped up a very basic tool to help me preview my sprite designs. I thought this might be useful to newbies because it has the following features:
. Integrating TWL into Slick
. Custom TWL UI (along with their theme XML definitions)
. SpriteSheet and Animation usage
. Basic game loop with smooth tile to tile movement
. A STaX driven config file parser
. Programmatically take sprites and recolor them (allow reusing sprites by creating versions with different colored themes)
Cleaning this up so that it could be accessed by others took much more than I expected and held up work on an actual game, but I feel compelled to share what I have learned so far.
You can download the webstart demo and source code at
http://www.fisharefriends.us/spritePreview