Help:Creating Character Pages

Welcome to the Dragdown page on Creating Character Pages. This page is intended to help any newer editors create and format their character's pages and subpages from scratch, to be ready for receiving information.

For a guide on actual writing style or conventions for pages that have already been created, please consult the Help:Writing Character Pages page.

If the character page in question already has its Overview and Data pages made and you're looking for how to create its subpages only (i.e. Advantage, Strategy, Tech), then you can skip down to the Creating Other Subpages section.

If something is not covered in this guide, or you are just plain confused, please consult the Dragdown Wiki Discord with any questions you may have.

Preface: What Character pages entail

A full set of character pages are made up of a "main" page (commonly called "Overview" page), and a handful of multiple "sub-pages" that are created from the character's main page. This is the list and structure of pages a character page typically has:

Overview Page
- The "Main" page of the character, this is the first page a reader for the character sees and contains a basic, brief playstyle and gameplan overview, basic stats, pros/cons, and then their movelist and detailed descriptions for each move.
Data Page
- Every character has dedicated data pages that transclude their info to character pages. This is where all frame data and nerdy technical data will be included.
Advantage Page
- This page is where all information about combos, and most information about combo resets, ledge trapping and edgeguarding game will be contained.
Tech Page
- This page is where all character-specific techniques will be described in detail.
Strategy/Counterstrategy Page
- The strategy page will include a more in-depth breakdown of the character's gameplan, options, and game states than what is listed on the overview. It should also list counterplay for the character's techniques and strategies.
Matchups Page
- This page will detail specific match-up intricacies for the character, versus every character.
Resources Page
- The Resources page is intended to be a "rough-draft" or "info-dump" repository of resources for the character. Things posted here don't necessarily need to be as thoroughly written and aren't to be held to as high standards as the main pages. It is mostly used for storing existing external resources, or resources that are to be transcribed to the regular pages.

Step 1: Starting the character's Overview page

A character's Overview page is the first page that must be created before the subpages can be made. This page and all the others are also partially dependent on having a Data Page, so if it does not look entirely right by the end of this step, fixing it will be gone over in the next.

To create a character's Overview page, simply click the character on a navigation CSS, and click "create the page" on the blank page screen if the character's page does not already exist. Next, you copy and paste the "Overview Page Boilerplate" code block from this page of site boilerplates into there, and save changes so the page is created.

Once this is done, the basic top section and the navigation sections at the bottom of a character's Overview page will be created, and there will be space left empty in the middle to be used later.

There will be quite a bit more that needs to be done to make the Overview page complete (adding moves and placeholders), but for now we will move on and come back later.

Step 2: Creating the character's Data Page

Every page, but the Overview page especially all rely on information kept in the Data page, so next you will create it as the first subpage. For this, you can click on a red link to a character's nonexistent Data page or append "/Data" to the page URL to get to the screen that allows you to create that specific page. Next, you copy and paste the "/Data Page Boilerplate" code block from this page of site boilerplates into there, and save changes so the page is created.

This will set up the "CharLinks" navigation template that every other page has, and also leave some space for you to add technical data.

Step 3: Ripping and exporting technical data, finishing Overview Page

Note that this step is one of the more "technical" aspects of constructing a character's set of pages compared to all the others, but if you follow along closely, it should be painless, but just takes time to complete.

Until this guide gets images, there is also a secondary guide that has a few example images and text to follow.

For a character to have their technical data be transcluded to the main page, it must be collected and placed in the Data page in a specific way to allow us to call it from another page and have it display. Fortunately, we have resources for simplifying many parts of this step:

An existing Character Data sheet, by Izzychu
- Go onto the Character Data drive and navigate to the spreadsheet of the character you want to export the data of, then go to File > Download > Comma Separated Values (.csv), and download it in that format.
A python script for scraping this data and exporting it into templates that the website will require, originally written by shiburizu from Mizuumi/SuperCombo wiki, partially edited by powder56
- Simply download this like you would any other file.

To get started after you download the files above:

Download and install the most recent version of Python from https://www.python.org/downloads/
Next, Open the Windows Command Prompt, and enter this statement to run the script to output formatted .txt files from the character .csv that you have:
```
py (script location) (frame data csv location) (character name)
```
- You can use Shift + Right Click > "Copy as Path" on each file as a fast way to copy their file directory for filling the arguments. Quotations must be included as well.
This will output two .txt files to your device, with one named as (Character name)_front.txt and the other named as (Character name)_data.txt You can use your operating system's "Search" function to find them if they don't output somewhere where you can find them immediately.
The one ending in _data.txt will have many cargo templates, all pre-formatted with the data from the character's spreadsheet. This is meant to be pasted on the Data page so all of the move datas will be added to the site's universal move database, so open it and go ahead and do so, in the space between the content that you have already pasted onto the page when creating it.
- IMPORTANT: Something that should be noted is that if a move has multiple varying hitboxes or versions (that were most likely purposefully separated on the CSV), such as sweetspots vs sourspots, strong hits vs weak hits, and angled versions, the script will spit out multiple templates for one move to indicate such, each with an ascending ID for each hitbox. This is perfectly fine, but you can delete redundant ones, such as duplicated angled moves, if their technical data is not different at all (i.e. Lucas F-Tilt).
- It is also ideal that you rename the headers (=====Text in between the equals===== and inputs (text that comes next to the "input=" field) for moves to specify which hit of the move it is, such as if it's the strong hit, weak hit, spike hit, final hit, etc. For example, for Lucas D-Air, you would change the header on the first set to =====Down Aerial (Initial Hits)=====, and on the second to =====Down Aerial (Final Hit)=====
  - You should cross-reference with Ultimate Hitboxes to make sure you have these right, as it's important for when you return to set up the front page.
Now, it's time to make the data replicate on the main Overview page. Head to the Overview page, and open the character .txt that ends in _front.txt, and you will see that this file also has templates that are pre-formatted and nested with other templates. This time, they do not add to the site's database of moves, but instead call information from it. Paste this into empty section between your overview/pros and cons top section and the navigation bar at the bottom. When this is previewed or published, move cards should be created for each template call.
- IMPORTANT AGAIN: Make sure that moves you deleted from the Data page for being redundant no longer have move cards, "MoveDataCargoImage" calls, or "AttackDataCargo-SSBU/Query" calls on the main Overview page, because they will just error since they do not exist in the database.
- All Jabs, and Grabs (+ Pummel, but not Throws) should also be manually combined into one move card for each set of those moves, instead of being separate from one another.

If you followed along correctly, you should have completed the construction of both the Overview and Data page for the character, and thus basically all of the heavy lifting is complete. If you were confused or have any questions at all about the process that was just detailed, please contact us on the Dragdown Wiki Discord for any assistance. Someone will be able to guide you through it, or even do it for you themselves.

Step 4: Creating other subpages

Now that the hard part is done, all the other character sub-pages are fairly easy to create.

For the Combos page, go to create the page, copy and paste this Combos Page Boilerplate into the space, and save.

For the Setplay page, go to create the page, but with the Setplay Page Boilerplate.

For the Resource Dump page, do the same thing but with the Resource Dump Boilerplate.

For the Strategy / Counterstrategy page, do the same but with the Strategy Page Boilerplate.

For the Matchups page, do the same but with the Matchups Page Boilerplate.

Step 5: Adding images

For help with creating images, check Help:Creating Images for the general guidelines and conventions.