Pixel Art 101: Sprite & Canvas Size

welcome back i'm one of the developers working on dwarf thank you all for supporting us on kickstarter and if you haven't then you suck when starting pixel art it's hard to decide what size your canvas should be and what size your sprites should be i'll start by talking about game engines so a lot of you are fans of gb studio and basically it lets you make games for the game boy or pc like legit your game would run on a game boy personally i love gb studio i think it's a great first game engine to get into and check it out i got a shout out here gerb's adventure the only con of gb studio really is that you can't sell your games on steam or the app store and to me that's kind of a big con gb studio 2 is coming out and they added a lot of cool features so i totally want to hop back into it i haven't done a tutorial in a long time but i'm totally going to do a platformer tutorial so in gb studio the sprites can only have four colors and they have to be 16 by 16. for backgrounds they can be no smaller than 160 by 144 and no bigger than 256 by 256. since i'm not a noob though and i know how to program i decided to go with unity for dwarve unity has none of the sprite limitations under the color limitations and overall it's just more powerful but of course it's more complicated so if you're just starting off in pixel art and you want to make games which probably would you probably do i would go with gb studio for now look i know there's a whole bunch of 2d game engines but if you don't know programming i would just do gb studio and then once you make the decision to learn programming skip over all those simple 2d game engines and just start using unity also gb studio is free now how you gonna beat that you just click the download button download now it recommends fifteen dollars you can say no thanks [Laughter] which you can also do when you download my free rss pack but i do appreciate the donations link in the description if you want to post something to twitter it only supports two types of aspect ratios one by one which means it's a square or um 16 by nine which is like a typical hd resolution if you want to post the image on twitter that's a square you have to export it as a gif in whatever pixel art program you use it doesn't really matter how big the size is when you start drawing because what you can do in almost all of them is change the canvas size so let's say i wanted to export one of these which by the way these are this is one of the rewards in the kickstarter you can become a statue in the game it's pretty pretty cool okay so let's say i wanted to um make this my canvas size right so if i wanted this to show up as a square on twitter i have to save it as a gif which means up here in the timeline well you might have it on the bottom you can click these three sliders and over here you can choose where this is that's a lot of people ask me about that anyway all you have to do is create a new frame and now that there's two frames now it's a gif and now if you go to file and you go to export make sure to make it much bigger maybe like 500 and make sure that it's a it's exported as a gif so you see this image right here it didn't get cropped it will say gif in the bottom left corner but i mean i think it's worth it the other solution is to take your canvas size so let's just go ahead and go to canvas size and let's say we want to keep it this height 72 and i'm going to put 72 here and it's going to tell me that to keep the 16 by 9 aspect ratio i need to make the width 129. so we go back in here and we change the width to 129 hit ok and now it won't be cropped when i post it on twitter by the way the program that i'm using it's called a sprite it's got a lot of pretty cool features you can drag these things around right here if you want to manually you know crop something so let's say i want to adjust this statue and there's a link in the description for this program i'm not sponsored by a sprite but i'll get a tiny kickback if you buy it through humble bundle link in the description pretty much in any program you can show a grid in a sprite you go to edit preferences grid i like to make it black and then i like to put the opacity pretty low let's hit apply and okay and there we go there's our grid overall i think it's easier to draw 16 by 16 art you'll get it done quicker and if you're not that great at drawing then go for 16 by 16 no one will even realize you suck at drawing however if you do have time patience and you're good at drawing there's not really a reason why you shouldn't do 32 by 32. for dwarve we aimed for 16 by 16. so all of these ground tiles are 16 by 16 but the objects on that they don't need to fit that size exactly so as you can see i can move this object around it's not actually drawn on the ground and it doesn't actually fit into this perfect 16 by 16 grid so there are no limitations but of course if you're going to have an environment you kind of need to pick whether you're going to go 16 by 16 32 by 32 and honestly that's up to you based on how much detail you want to add into your drawings the thing is if you are a beginner pixel artist i think it's harder for you i think it's easier to hide the fact that you're not so good when you do 16 by 16 art for dwarve our environment is 16 by 16 and our enemies are made to fit that environment but they don't have to stick within the 16x16 because there's no limitations to the engine so as you can see here this necromancer looks like a 16x16 character but if we zoom in you can see that the sprite bleeds a little bit and this is fantastic because it looks like our character fits the environment but when we need to we can make the sprite a little bit bigger unfortunately you can't do that in gb studio now that the dwarf kickstarter is out i have a little bit more time so i'll be uploading more frequently i'll see you guys next time please subscribe please subscribe

Channel: Pixel Pete (Peter Milko)

Views: 49,140

Keywords: petermilko, peter milko, pixelpete, pixel pete, pixel art, pixelart, pixel art tutorial, how to draw pixel, pixel art tutorials, 16bit, 8bit, how to draw pixel art, how to draw pixelart, draw pixel art, draw pixelart, pixel art video game, 8bit game, 16bit game, pixel art 101, pixelart 101, sprite size, canvas size, 16x16, 32x32

Id: wNcQqGzfWKE

Length: 5min 47sec (347 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Chenja]

Not a bad video, but it only talks about 16x16 and 32x32 for a small amount of the video near the end

[u/drashubxvi]

Man... I used to love your videos so much. Now it just feels like you've completely sold out. Your vids are chalked full of promotions/shout outs for various apps/games/software etc. Feels like im watching sponsored ads with a hint of pixel art advice. Feelsbadman

[u/Danes98]

I like your vids, but it was really short :c Maybe could make a video for 16x16 and 32x32 sprite making? Maybe even one for each. I want to learn but there aren't really good beginner focused sprite making ones XD and I like your "spriting" style, I'd love to learn from you.