Background/character resolutions

[Grundislav]

This is something that has come up in my GiP thread.

For Lamplight City, I'm painting backgrounds at 960x600 and scaling them down to 640x400. Sprites are being done for 320x200 resolution and scaled up to 640x400 using nearest neighbor. Some people have pointed out that this is jarring and that it makes the sprites stand out from the backgrounds. I personally can't see it as much of an issue, but I've been looking at it so long that I've probably gotten used to it. As an experiment, I tried scaling the backgrounds down to 320x200 with the same settings in order to match the sprites, and honestly, I find the loss of detail and blurriness that causes to be unacceptable.

Here is the comparison:
640x400 scaled background

320x200 scaled background


I really don't think the sprites stand out any more against the 320x200 background than they do against the 640x400 one. I also feel like more people will complain about blurry backgrounds than they will about pixellated sprites, but that might just be me.

Thoughts are appreciated!

[Blondbraid]

I'd think that when you have such lovely and detailed backgrounds it would be a shame to scale them down.
Is it not possible to maybe use some form of anti-aliasing or blur effect to smooth out the characters instead?
It's also hard to tell from a still image alone, but if you managed to get used to the difference in resolution,
chances are that players might too.

[Danvzare]

I prefer the bottom one (which sounds hypocritical of me considering some of my other recent posts).
But even so, I'd really hate to see such a lovely background lose so much for something so minor.

Go for the one you prefer (which appears to be the top one).
And I'd have to agree with Blondbraid, perhaps you can somehow upscale the sprites.
Maybe run all of the character sprites through a scale2x filter, and then reimport them. That should be quick and painless (assuming you can find the scale2x filter to apply to images, if you can't, I'll link you to it). Actually, I think it would look quite nice if you did that..

[Snarky]

Yeah, that bottom one is unusable. (Edit: I mean, it still looks great, but the loss of detail and the blurriness is a much worse compromise, IMO.)

I think it looks a bit better if you downscale with nearest-neighbor...

[imgzoom]http://i.cubeupload.com/CUW2Ol.png[/imgzoom]

... But honestly the high-res backgrounds with low-res characters is fine. And I would expect that any filter you could put on them would screw up the pixel art, e.g. in the faces.

[Cassiebsg]

Think you missed the point a bit there.
The meaning was not to downscale the BGs but instead get sprite that are meant to be for 640x400 with the appropriate detail. That of course is a lot of work, and I quite understand if you rather not go there.

In the end, I think if you manage to get the player immersed (and I'm sure you will) then the player will get used to it, and will be focusing on the BGs more than the character.

How much the mismatched graphics might, or not, affect sale, I can't say. Probably not that much.

[SilverSpook]

Just glancing at it, the only thing that stands out is the smoothness of the backgrounds compared to the sharpness of the characters.

[dactylopus]

The backgrounds and sprites are both done incredibly well for what they are.  Those are great 640x400 backgrounds, and those are great 320x200 sprites.

Unfortunately, I don't think the 2 fit together.  The pixels on the characters stand out because the background looks much nicer and more detailed.  It's like taking a beautifully drawn character by Moebius and putting it into a beautifully rendered painting by Van Gogh.  Both are beautiful in their own right, but the 2 styles don't necessarily work together.  Just for fun, here's a mockup of my above example:



I stuck to a character and background that shared similar color palettes, and while there is an obvious difference in style and level of detail, I think it's still relatively passable.

I don't like your compromise of scaling the backgrounds to 320x200.  They could definitely work, as they still look great, and the characters seem to fit in better with the resolution, but there is a noticeable lack of detail in specific areas of the background that definitely makes the larger size worth using.  I can fully understand how this is unacceptable to you.

A better solution would be to make the characters at the same resolution as the backgrounds.  This is obviously a lot of work, and I can fully understand if you or anyone else would choose to continue with what they have.

All of that said, I'm being very picky.  Your screenshots actually look really good, despite the difference in resolutions, much like how my above example is still passable.  I would say that the best idea is to do what you feel is best for your project.  Will there be a loss of sales due to the graphical differences?  Perhaps, but I doubt it's enough to justify the additional workload of redesigning all of your sprites.  So I guess the real question is this:  How much work have you already done in designing and animating your sprites, and would it be a great waste to throw it all away and begin again at a higher resolution?

[xil]

I've been using Adventure Creator/Unity a lot recently and it really kills me having to use different pixel resolutions as I'm working in 3D with voxels and a low-res UI. But, I'm slowly coming round to it not being the worst thing in the world and your higher res backgrounds do work very well with the sprites even though they are scaled slightly differently. I barely noticed the issue in the first image, but when I looked at the feet next to the lamp post, it was slightly jarring.

It would be very unlikely I personally would be put off buying the game, or rate it lower based on the differing resolutions but that being said I do really like what Snarky did with the nearest neighbour down-scale. Being totally honest, if I had an in-game option to use the original scaling in your first image or Snarky's version, I would switch to Snarky's as it retains quite a lot of detail and removes any possible issues with conflicting resolutions.

[imgzoom]http://i.cubeupload.com/CUW2Ol.png[/imgzoom]

On a side note: the trouble with asking people on AGS is that we are primarily devs and we'd be more likely to be bothered by things like conflicting pixel resolutions. A lot of players won't even know what conflicting pixel resolutions mean, let alone care. If the game plays well and is fun/engrossing etc, I can't see it making a huge difference. I've seen much, MUCH worse examples of conflicting resolutions!

[Grundislav]

Yeah, I'm really leaning towards keeping it as it is, and am aware that AGS devs would notice it more than anyone else.

The reason I didn't mention redoing the sprites to fit the higher res is because I currently have 745 sprites I would have to redo. At this point, that's just not worth it (especially because even if I do it, I'm sure there will be plenty of people who complain the game is still "low-res")

It doesn't seem to be as noticeable in-game, as the few people so far who have tested haven't mentioned anything about it, so we'll just see what happens I guess! In the end, people don't play low res pixel adventures for the graphics, right?

[SilverSpook]

Yeah, probably as long as you don't open the game with the most jarring obvious discrepancy, like start with scenes where the characters blend a little better into the background, then most people won't notice later on in the game being too drawn into the world and story to care. 

On the other hand, you put something in an AGS critic section and ask if there is a problem with something and, as they say, "You cannot unsee it!"

Probably if you had an obscure Van Gogh and threw it up anonymously to critics, someone would start pointing out the incorrect shading or shoddy perspective, inevitably.

[dactylopus]

The reason I didn't mention redoing the sprites to fit the higher res is because I currently have 745 sprites I would have to redo. At this point, that's just not worth it (especially because even if I do it, I'm sure there will be plenty of people who complain the game is still "low-res")

Absolutely not worth it.  Your work looks beautiful, it's just a few nitpicky AGS fans noticing the little things.

Probably if you had an obscure Van Gogh and threw it up anonymously to critics, someone would start pointing out the incorrect shading or shoddy perspective, inevitably.

That's a great point, too.

[Hobo]

The backgrounds look good the way they are, there's no point in downscaling them to 320x200. If you really want to change something, it has to be the characters.

There are two main issues for me: the double sized pixels look too sharp compared to the smooth backgrounds and there's a huge difference in color count. As Danvzare mentioned, using some sort of upscaling filter would be a possible solution. You could also try to mess around with contrast, saturation and brightness of the sprites to make the colors blend in more with a specific environment.

I recommend that you spend a day or two to test some stuff out and if it's not working, then just drop it, it's not worth it.

It was actually a pretty bold move to make a game that takes place under the lamplights and has such amazing lighting and shadows, because this means that the character shading will often look off, which also adds to the feeling that they don't quite belong in this world.

But as I already said in the production thread, the graphics in their current state are still enjoyable and I'd buy and play your games even if they'd look like the early Ben Jordan releases.

[Snarky]

To all of you complaining about consistency between backgrounds and characters... have you ever seen an adventure game?



It's extremely common for the character sprites to have a different look than the backgrounds: In almost all VGA games (e.g. KQ5), sprites use only a small palette, e.g. 16 colors, while backgrounds use almost all 256, creating a clear visual distinction. Games like Broken Sword use cartoony cel-animation (or cel-shaded animation) on top of painted backgrounds. Games like Phantasmagoria or Riddle of Master Lu use motion-captured actors on top of 3D-rendered backgrounds. Games like Grim Fandango use low-poly 3D models on top of high-resolution background renders.

Yes, obviously having the characters drawn in the same resolution would be the ideal, but since Grundislav didn't do that in the first place there's clearly a reason for it, presumably the time/difficulty of animating high-res characters. (I've heard it said that high-resolution sprites also require more frames for the animation to look good, so it's not just four times as many pixels to paint.)

I think as a matter of blending the characters into the environments, shading/tinting and shadows are far more important than the resolution.

Of course, it becomes a little dicier if/when characters have to interact with the environment. things like doors opening, or the splash from diving into the river, or tying a rope to a lamppost and then pulling it over, to take three imagined examples: do you consistently keep all such action-animation in low-res, or do you vary it depending on whether the objects are more part of the scene or part of the character, or what?

...

Anyway, mismatched resolutions usually do bother me, but I think that's because it's almost always a sign of sloppiness and incompetence. Here it's obviously an artistic/technical choice, applied consistently, so it looks fine.

One thing I would watch out for is having two double-sized sprites right next to each other, but not aligned to the same two-pixel grid (so that you get only a single pixel separation between them, for example, or so they overlap in a way where the pixels don't line up). I think that would bother me.

One way to avoid this would be to always ensure that all walkto-coordinates are consistently even (or consistently odd), which you can ensure with a little snippet of code in the on_mouse_click() handler, and of course in any scripted walk commands â€" also, since characters are centered on the x-axis they should all have an even character-width (counting in double-pixels), or the pivot will fall in the "middle" of a double-pixel. (The MovementSpeed must also be an even value, but that's probably a given in any case in order to avoid sliding.) As long as you don't do any character scaling I think that should take care of it.

[Hobo]

It's extremely common for the character sprites to have a different look than the backgrounds

Yes, I agree, such difference is actually quite common in adventure games, most likely due to ease of animation, and while it's not my preffered visual solution, it doesn't really stop me from enjoying games (though it might be something that separates great games from good ones).

Also, there's a big difference between 256/16 and 40000/20-30. The 256 colors usually spread out evenly enough, meaning that when you take character-sized chunk from the background, it will have roughly the same amount of colors as the character (or maybe 3-4 times more).

Of course, it becomes a little dicier if/when characters have to interact with the environment.

I didn't even think about objects to be honest and now I'm kind of wondering how will it look if the character has to pick something up from the environment. Is this also the reason the game doesn't have an inventory - to limit object interactions?

And Grundislav, would you mind posting an original 960x600 version of one of your backgrounds? Would be interesting to see how it looks in its full glory.

[Grundislav]

There are plenty of object interactions. Objects in the environment are part of the background, I've avoided the "high res GK1 effect" where they are sprites which stick out against the backgrounds. As an example of what it looks like, here's an animation I tweeted a while back of characters opening a door to enter/exit a room. (It's a bit sped up compared to how it is in-game, but you get the idea)

Here's another from the same room taking a plant off a hook and then taking the hook.

And here is the original 960x473 background for you:

[Snarky]

Also, there's a big difference between 256/16 and 40000/20-30. The 256 colors usually spread out evenly enough, meaning that when you take character-sized chunk from the background, it will have roughly the same amount of colors as the character (or maybe 3-4 times more).

Whatever the color count, I would argue that the contrast is obvious:

Spoiler

[imgzoom]http://imgur.com/6lO6wNs.png[/imgzoom]
(Ignore jpg artifacts)

[imgzoom]http://imgur.com/emw7D4K.gif[/imgzoom]

[close]

It depends on the graphic style, of course â€" it's much less so in games with flat cartoon backgrounds like DOTT or Sam & Max.

As an example of what it looks like, here's an animation I tweeted a while back of characters opening a door to enter/exit a room. (It's a bit sped up compared to how it is in-game, but you get the idea)

Here's another from the same room taking a plant off a hook and then taking the hook.

Hey, that works just fine!

[dactylopus]

To all of you complaining about consistency between backgrounds and characters... have you ever seen an adventure game?

...

Probably worth noting that I don't have experience with the particular games you mention in your post.  That's probably because I either didn't care for the art, or I didn't care for the genre and story.  I'll add that color depth and pixel size are 2 completely different things.  Color depth differences are frequently seen in many animated games, shows, or movies, where it can be somewhat obvious which objects are part of the background and which will have interaction.

Anyways, after seeing the animations, I'd have to say that they look fantastic.  The rotoscoping really helps to resolve any issues, since the animations are all as realistic as the backgrounds.  I don't anticipate anyone but the most picky to have issues with this.  And wow, that original sized background looks great!

[Andail]

I'll just chime in and say that you obviously shouldn't remake all those sprite. The small gains wouldn't be worth the hassle, not to mention all the extra future work it'd entail.

I'm in the exact same situation, since I've also just moved up to 640x400 resolution, but I chose to increase character resolution too, as you can clearly see in my GiP thread. However, that means the sprites will take muuuch longer to make and animating them will be quite a herculean task.

Snarky, I wouldn't say that adventure games often mix resolutions. As Dactylopus said, colour depth and resolution are quite different things, stylistically. Throughout the history of animation we've seen moving parts standing out from backgrounds in their crispness and flatness. 2D games have traditionally had animating parts with less shading and gradients than the often handpainted backgrounds.

I don't think there's a reason to beat around the bush: Having character art that matches the background art in terms of resolution is objectively better. If you want to be puritan about it and claim you prefer low-res pixel art for stylistic reasons, then surely you'd prefer pixel-based, low-res backgrounds as well.

[Hobo]

Whatever the color count, I would argue that the contrast is obvious:

Yeah, I'm not arguing that there is no distinction, it just looks less jarring to me in those 256 color games.

As an example of what it looks like, here's an animation I tweeted a while back of characters opening a door to enter/exit a room. (It's a bit sped up compared to how it is in-game, but you get the idea)
Here's another from the same room taking a plant off a hook and then taking the hook.

These animations look good enough for me and thanks for posting that background, it looks awesome. Now I'd really like to see a HD game from you in the future, you certainly have the skills for it (as long as you don't use 4x upscaled characters )

[Grundislav]

Now I'd really like to see a HD game from you in the future, you certainly have the skills for it (as long as you don't use 4x upscaled characters )

Nah don't worry, I think high res sprites will be my learning goal for the next game.

[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.