Pixel art resolution tips?
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Hi folks,
I'm new to Fuze, just getting used to some basics, really loving it!
I'm making a few retro style assets, sprites, tiles, backgrounds.
So far I've been making things to 'power of 2' sizes, so 8, 16, 32 pixels etc...
I played around a bit with the scale and found that somewhere around 4 X up looked pretty close to what I'm after, so I set my x and y sprite size to 4. Then to work out how tall to make the background image I divided 720 by 4 giving me 180. This looks good and now the sprite resolution matches the background.
But 180 is not a power of 2 number, so my tiles don't properly fit on the screen, this makes me sad.
So I change the height of the Background image to 192 and now I have the same y display resolution as a ZX Spectrum and this makes me happy!
Now though, to get the sprite to match the BG I have to set the scale to 3.75. This just seems a bit odd to me to be telling it to display fractions of pixels. Seems to look fine, so maybe it doesn't matter?
So far I'm only using hand held mode, but eventually I'll be trying to get everything to display correctly in docked mode too.
So I'm just wondering if anyone has any thoughts or wisdom to impart about this? Do people still use power of 2 for sprites and tiles? Does any of this matter at all?
Sorry for the rambling post, Fuze is great, hopefully I'll have some stuff to share soon... -
Power of 2 is a great place to start! But I wouldn't scale anything by fractions of pixels. It'll look fine for the most part, but each scaled pixel will be a different size.
As far as scaling, instead of scaling your sprites I'd suggest learning how to draw to images and then scale them so you get a pixel perfect look. I've got a template for it here: http://fuzearena.com/forum//topic/975/arcade-resolution-with-tate-mode-template
You can set the resolution at the top of the screen, and it will scale it pixel perfect to your screen, docked or undocked. I recommend 320 x 180 for a good 16:9 resolution, but if you're fine with a border/black bars on the side whatever resolution works! -
@retrocade_media Thank you! This is exactly the sort of info and help I need, I'll definitely have a good look at this template. I'm starting to get the hang of scaling things by divisions of the screen height rather than using set numbers, but of course this doesn't fit with power of 2 without resulting in fractions. I'll keep going with this, I'm sure the Templates will help me out a lot, thanks again. I guess I could use 'int' to turn floats into integers?
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I second 320x180 as a great choice. It scales evenly to 720p (factor 4) and 1080p (factor 6). If you use sprites and maps, you practically don't have to do any work yourself, just set the sprite camera accordingly and it will do the rest. Yeah, you can't fill 180 with 16x16 or even 8x8 tiles, but that should not stop you. In a free scrolling game, it does not matter at all. In a side scroller, either just use 176 of your pixels, giving you 11 16x16 tiles height and some borders, or go for 192 logical pixel height, cutting off the (hopefully unimportant) top and bottom 6 pixels. Or even just use 160 pixels for your gameplay, using the rest for a fancy scoreborard/status display.
Even back then, sprites on the C64 were 24x21 pixels (if monochrome). So don't bind yourself to power of two sizes just because it's retro.
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@z-mann Thanks. So my thinking now is to abandon the power of 2, my current sprites are 32 and my tiles are 16 so if I replace these with sprites of 30 and tiles of 15 then I'll get a pleasing 12 tile high screen (going with 180 for the screen y res) and everything should fit and scale between handheld and docked without any fractions. This seems like a good way forward, if anyone disagrees, let me know.
Thanks again folks for the help with this, even though I'm just doing a little test project, I didn't want to make loads of tiles and sprites and then realise that the pixel sizes I've chosen creates problems further down the line. -
Oh, you meant the tiles too? That might make your life a difficult, as the map editor's grid snap only offers powers of two to snap to. You'll still have 'snap to object' and I think without snapping, it'll still snap to integer pixel coordinates, so it's not impossible to work with, just very fiddly. Definitely try it out before doing any big work. Of course, if you use your own tile map render system, disregard all that, do whatever you want there.
