Background/character resolutions

[Monsieur OUXX]

@fransisco :
As said by others, most people (I said most people) don't like mismatched resolutions.

Spoiler

it's very well accepted nowadays by younger players who play fake retro-pixel games (enter the gungeon and such) but that's because when it happens, in most of these games the sprites keep being scaled up and down, or skewed diagonally, with lots of effects. These distortion effects make the brain forget that the sprite is actually low-res. It becomes indirectly hi-res. But in a point n click, the player character is much more static and follwing the actual pixel grid of the background.

[close]

If the characters' resolution is not too different from the background's resolution (1.5x to 2x at most I'd say?), however, it's not too shocking.

Like everyone said before, the best way to downscale a digitally-painted image is to use nearest neighbour.

Now for some things that haven't been said already:
- you should paint your backgrounds in twice the resolution. If the game is meant to be 640x400, then paint in 1280x800. Dividing by two will make the diagonals and such look more "aligned" with the pixel grid. Downscaling 66% (960x600 --> 640x400)  is... unpredictable. Don't wrry too much if the picture is slightly blurry in hi-res. It will become crispier in low-res.
- if you can't upscale your many sprites, how about bulk-processing them to apply one of those specially designed filters such as mame2x, hq2x and others?

Spoiler

[close]

There will be a tedious job of re-importing, but at least you won't have to redraw anything.

[KyriakosCH]

Pixel by pixel art is very hard... (i can only do 3d)

Background and characters look very good! Has an old-game feel too...

[Cassiebsg]

There will be a tedious job of re-importing

It is?
If one places the sprites with the same filename and same source, you can select all your sprites (or all in a folder) and select "Replace sprite(s) from source..." ... only a few clicks actually.
I would say trying the upscaling of the sprites using one of those filters, might be worth a try (just make sure you backup the originals, just in case the new looks worse in game)...

[Darth Mandarb]

For what it's worth; I rather like the mismatch of resolutions.

It gives it a style.

[Mandle]

For what it's worth; I rather like the mismatch of resolutions.

It gives it a style.

I must agree with this: Especially when I watch them animated I do not feel jarred at all by the mismatch...

[Quintaros]

I don't have an issue with the mismatch.  I just think that the background art is so nice looking at its resolution that it's a shame you didn't attempt to do characters in hi res as well.  I don't really understand why low-res sprites would be less work than hi res sprites.  I mean pixel by pixel, yes, but it looks like you're moving toward a more painterly style.