I plan on making a 2d 8-bit game and am wondering what I should do with the images.
Should I make them larger or keep them the same size and change some option, if so, wait option?
You will be wanting your sprites to scale according to the nearest neighbour rather than bilinearly. This can be changed in the graphics settings, as below (‘nearest’ rather than ‘linear’). This will make your sprites non-blurry when resized, which is the kind of behavior that you want for pixel games.
As for making the sprites, you can make them in 1:1 scale, but it might be easier to make them bigger when working with making them. That is up to you, and I don’t know any particular benefit to either.
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One benefit with keeping them small would be that you would save a lot of texture space, meaning the game will be smaller in memory and on disk, resulting in a game that will run on most devices with minimal footprint and with (presumably) fast loading times.
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Well, in theory that’s of course true (bar the ‘a lot’), but in my own personal project, the images are scaled 4:1, and each image file still only takes up about ~1-2kB versus the ~800 bytes of its 1:1 version. Each script file alone is several times bigger than each of these, so one can safely say that the benefit is negligible.
As to why I use 4:1, it’s mostly because it allows for some very nice fake shader opportunities, while maintaining the appearance of a traditional pixel game.
Thanks, I decided to enlarge them after importing them and use the nearest feature, it helps with keeping a low space file on my computer and makes it easier to go back and edit the photos again when needed. Thanks for the help guys.
But what about texture memory? If you have a lot of images scaled to 4x then the resulting texture will be quite large compared to if you used 1x images and scaled the entire game in the render script.
On the other hand you have texture compression and I’m guessing that 4x scaled images will compress rather nicely.
I am not certain of texture memory, but I am fairly sure that there will be a spike in that, yes. Compression works beautifully for them, however, in a very natural way, and I feel the benefits for the purposes of what I need outweigh the drawbacks (which are yet to appear, as there are still not too many textures present anyway). I might consider a hybrid approach as the game grows.
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