Do characters have to look "pixilated"? Want to do high-texture sprites...

[Valda]

Hey guys, my friend is an art student and we were thinking about making a game. The problem is that the characters in all the games we've seen with AGS are too pixilated. We want our characters to be drawn and have high-textures. She got a drawing device that connects to her computer so drawing on her computer is not a problem. We just want to know if its possible to have high-textured characters (AKA sprite images) in game?

[selmiak]

It sure is possible, it is just easier to animate pixel characters than painted characters. When animating painted characters it might looks awkward when you don't use enough frames so there is extrawork for the inbetween frames. Besides nostalgia that's probably the main reason why a lot of people use pixeled characters.

[cat]

It all depends on the resolution you use.

Some recent samples of games with higher resolution:
Donald Dowell and the Ghost of Barker Manor
Breakage (this one also has fantastic animation)
Adventure Island Didn't play this one myself yet.

Some time ago I made this little game with 1024x768 resolution (currently the maximum possible afaik)

[Calin Leafshade]

Some time ago I made this little game with 1024x768 resolution (currently the maximum possible afaik)

The custom resolution build of the engine supports any resolution.. I don't think it has any upper bound (although I imagine it would fail at anything above 2048x2048)

[Ali]

As Calin says, with the custom resolutions build, you shouldn't have much trouble creating a 1280x720 or 1920x1080 game. In my experience performance only becomes bad when trying to animate near-screen-sized sprites, or using the tween module on screen-sized GUIs.

At the moment the biggest aesthetic issues are downscaling (which looks rough if an HD game is played on a smaller screen) and fonts (which are not rendered very well at higher resolutions and also suffer badly from downscaling). You can make those things work, though.

If your art student friend uses flash, then you could look at Lassie Studio: http://lassiegames.com/lassie

[azstreet]

I wonder. I have been wanting to make something that looks like Mystery Case Files, or at least something of that level. Will AGS be better for that or should I use Lassie? I'm not going to animate that much, but I need the adventure game elements be done (like inventory etc.) because it's seriously painful to do that in Flash...

[Etumretniw]

/.../
Breakage (this one also has fantastic animation)
/.../

Thanks Actually the majority of the animations in Breakage don't have more than 5-6 unique frames. However there are more than 250 animations, counting everything that moves . There are some larger ones (the castle's bucket-hoisting for instance) but many of those too have minute differences between frames, reducing the time to draw them. The walk cycles were a pain though