Newbie Question About Sprites

[duperduckey]

Ive been trying to work on my art and design for game design and my main problem is learning about sprites. My question is what is the size the canvas has to be for a "normal" sized sprite. I just get really confused with how resolution and sizing compare or change honestly im probably just am over thinking it. Any advice helps also Happy New Year!

[Mike at BrashMonkey]

Welcome duperduckey,

The best way to make such decisions is to start by making a mock-up (fake) screen of your game at the actual target resolution.

So, say for example you want your game to run at a high-res 1920x1080, you should start by making a fake screen (using layers) in a program like Photoshop or Krita (which is awesome and FREE  www.krita.org) of your game, including the player sprite, HUD and generic enemies.

 

This will hep you figure out exactly how big your player sprite needs to be.

Typically, once I do this, I then actually create the player sprite and animate it at 2x the required size in Spriter. This allows me wo work faster and a little sloppier with my art, because eventually I'll scale it back down to the actually needed resolution, and when you reduce art to 50 percent, it cleans up nicely. (don't do this if you're making a retro low-res pixel art game)

Do NOT work at crazy print resolutions!

I hope this helps.