Information
What is kisekae set system?
Kisekae set system (aka kisekae or kiss) was an interactive system that allowed users to play dress-up games using digital art based on real-life paper dolls. The term Kisekae comes from the word kisekae ningyou (着せ替え人形) which means "dress up-doll".
History of kisekae:
Earlier kiss dolls were based on shojo characters, usually being sailor moon dolls although there were other animes out there that had kiss dolls aswell.
sailor jupiter doll released in 1994 by Five pennies (source)
Just like real-life paper dolls, Using kiss you could move around clothing pieces and put them on your "doll" (the character that was featured in the game). Sometimes there was more than one doll and sometimes some people used this system to make games other than dress-up.
FAKE doll released in 2001 by Mary (source)
Chess game released in 1999 by Chan Chan (source)
The first initial viewer software for Kiss was designed for NEC PC-9800 using a palette of 16 colors to display the doll. Later on, an enhanced version was created called "General specification 2 aka 'KiSS/GS2'" which included support for VGA cards and 256 or multiple 16 color palettes. Kiss/GS2 is still the basis of kiss, but additions were also incorporated into viewers such as "French kiss" aka Fkiss which allowed interactivity and animation, and "Cherry kiss" aka Ckiss for 32-bit "true" color support. Later in the late 90s kiss spread over overseas with the help of the internet, with the help of programmers such as Dov Sherman who made initial viewers for Macintosh and Windows.
With kiss dolls being introduced in overseas, dolls for other media besides anime were created as well.
Mayu (from Lareine) doll released in 2004 by Julia (source)
Aeon Flux released in 1999 by Satori (source)
Formats:
common formats used for the dolls are CEL files. A configuration file is also used to control field size, layering, cel position, use of palettes, and interaction and animation events. For packaging all of the cel files and the final doll, LZH format is used. For music MIDI files and WAV files are supported.
Creating kiss:
Usually for creating kiss dolls, a configuration is written using a text editor like note. After the files are created a kiss viewer is used to display the doll. Later on, an archiver that supports LZH format is used for packaging. For drawing the clothes and doll, programs that support CEL files are used but programs that convert PNG or gif files to CEL files is also used. If you want to create your kiss doll using modern computers I recommend Ultrakiss, since creating kiss dolls with it is way easier and you don't need a CEL convertor program as you can convert gif/png files to CEL inside it! Plus it comes with a lot of tutorial with it in case you were lost.
Screenshot of ultrakiss
Download links and recourses: