Game sprites: What's the right resolution?

this tutorial is another free sample from my course make painterly game out with Krita a course that will show you the techniques professionals use to make game art it's also a question a number of you asked me so I thought this would be quite useful anti you want to use the right document size or resolution for your sprite how do you know which one it is game artists follow a simple rule of thumb they work at two times the game's maximum target resolution for example I decided to make an HD game with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels so I painted my first concept and the characters in a document that's twice as big that is to say 3840 x 2160 pixels there are a few reasons for that first of all some of the operations we do in a digital painting program are destructive when you use the free transform or the liquify tool you lose a bit of precision on your character's edges if you work at two times the game's resolution it's not a problem because you will down scale all the sprites before you import them in the game engine and resizing sprites like that will sharpen them a little bit secondly the higher resolution allows you to zoom in a bit more and will make it easier to add details and the polishing phase but at the same time you can zoom in too much so you can't add tiny details and elements that won't make a difference on the final sprite and lastly in case you want to support Retina displays can also do that because your source document has twice the pixel density of the final game now the question is how do you know what your target resolution is this is a task for V developers all game designers it's a technical fact that another member of your team will generally give you as the artist for the training I recommend that you work with the same resolution as me one of the most common on desktop today the sixteen by nine screen ratio is also common with phones and tablets so your assets will most likely work in many configurations and in any case you'll be able to produce a beautiful high-resolution piece of artwork for your portfolio to will go with a target resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels a quick tip to make your working document twice as big first creates your HD document like normal so you create a new document set the width to 1920 height to 1080 press ENTER then go to image scale image to new size or press ctrl alt I change the dimension to % enter 200 in the corresponding box and it will effectively double your document size once I have this base resolution set I just paint inside of it and try to find the right proportions for the various sprites relative to one another as I told you before it's often more the game prototype that will dictate some key proportions but you do have a bit of freedom regarding that as an artist and for this project I also want you to focus on your art on making beautiful and sharp sprites because aside from your professional experience it's mostly the appeal of your art that will get you hired and help your game to sell another technical tip I recommend that you create each character in a separate crater document I exported my first before I started working on the characters so it only takes one layer and doesn't slow crater down the program can become quite slow when you work with large documents and it gets worse as your layer stack grows more and more complex that's why as soon as I have a good design for the character in this environment I grab the document to make it as small as possible you only need the background to establish the proportions and get your contrast right you can then polish the character in isolation Krita becomes a lot more responsive that way and you can work more comfortably last but not least this resolution is but the frame of our mocha it's visible limits our game assets will likely be larger than that sometimes they will go out of the screen it's often the case with trees for example in the game the camera will move and it might even zoom in or out when you paint an illustration you will stop to what you see on screen but when you make game assets the parts that might not be visible in your digital painting program that you will still have to paint because in the game when the character jumps or moves around they might become visible or you might want to reuse an asset in a different setting or with a different scale in which case you will need it to be full' quite simply

Channel: GDQuest

Views: 71,881

Keywords: game sprite resolution, game sprite size, game asset size, game resolution, krita tutorial, game art tutorial

Id: rr-qj8rD9z0

Length: 5min 10sec (310 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 23 2017