agreed

Seriously. I've been searching for more paint-like art for games and all I find is pixel art

Right I’m so sick of pixel art

there is nothing wrong with pixel art if its actually good but i like both

Ye for sure, I want to touch on it and have started on it a bit, but I can't entirely say when it will come, I have quite a few videso that are further along in development and will probably be released before :( I have a video on usability of UI, but it doesn't discuss the artistic aspects of UI sadly.

@@Nonsensical2D My comment should by no means pressure you into doing it. If you already thought about it then obviously it would be cool but do it at your own pace and will. I really do appreciate your videos and I will for sure buy your game whenever you release it. I can't stress enough how helpful you've been, I went from "I won't be able to do this" to "maybe there's a chance I can actually build this game", which is HUGE. Thanks!

I would assume that in order to get absolute best performance you would break it into pieces and then stick all the pieces in a sprite sheet and then make your house using tiles (you would probably end up with the least memory usage and only one draw call this way). But you don't always need to go for best performance, I rarely do. I tend to start with the method I am the quickest with, and if I need to improve performance, then I do it. If your house is almost perfectly one nice square building, then just placing it as one big picture is going to have very similar performance to placing it in a sprite sheet, and if your size is 600x400 then that is a fairly small size to begin with (less than 1 MiB i think) so I doubt breaking it down into pieces would even net you a significant performance boost. Ye, pixel art is significantly easier to run well because of file sizes :) it also tends to be significantly smaller size for the entire game as well, Iconoclasts is like 160 mb for the entire game, whereas GRIS is 3.4 GB, even though gris is probably a shorter game :)

@@Nonsensical2D that's a relief, I'm using Godot right now and plan to get busy with 2d assets, so if things get crazy I just use tiles for the large sprites. thanks a lot for the answer, you are a beast!

Right?

Ye I kind of feel the same to some extent. I've read a lot about it and been doing it for quite a while (and have some background in adjacent stuff), but it feels to some extent like there are no videos or texts covering it at all, which is why I felt the need to at least cover the basics for those who are real beginners to game dev and programming (because it can be a bit overwhelming). With that said I know my management of it is suboptimal, but it works, and that feels kind of like the indie dev motto.

Ye, I sometimes think about doing it and have done it for some videos. But I generally don't write my script in "chapters" so it always feels awkward to place sections and chapters since it isn't entirely clear to me where one topic begins and one ends.

for me it has happened on more than one occasion that I realise I actually need higher resolution for an asset, and its obviously quicker to just be able to change it in engine. And you might have to tinker with the build depending on the platform and such in the future and then needing to adjust the textures in the engine anyway, so I have personally gone with making my project more versatile and placed changed everything in engine.

Yes, everything is scripted, pretty much every single word is said as written. I used to memorise each line and then say it, but nowadays I use a teleprompter and actually read from the script when speaking (you can sometimes see my eyes scan when speaking). I think whether a script will be good for you or not kind of depends on what kind of person you are, I don't really like speaking off the cuff in a video, because there is a high risk I get sidetracked or explain a concept suboptimally. But the downside is that a script generally takes time, a lot of time. 1000 words are about 5 minutes for me, so on occasion I can sit with scripts that are 4-5k long, which is like a decently sized essay :)

@@Nonsensical2D Thanks for the info!

Why would you use 300DPI when a video screen (all of them) are only 72 to 96 dpi? You don't understand DPI and confuse it with resolution!

Hi, I don't know if you have read it yet, but there's a really good blog post that covers a lot of what you are asking called "choosing the resolution of your 2D art assets" on the unity blog. making it 2x as I described mostly refers to making the sprite, the exported sprite tends to be good to keep at around the size you need it for (because of performance issues). As far as I recall changing PPU or scaling the asset shouldn't make that big of a difference. I'd check the blog post, just search for the title in google, I haven't personally worked in unity for the past 3 years, so I can't recall orthographic sizes and such, sadly. Hope it helps and good luck! Edit: I realized now that maybe you were referring to 2^n, from what you are describing do you mean that you actually want your asset size to be say 400 pixels, but you try to fit it to 512 and then scale it down, so now it looks off? If scaling it down makes the asset look pixelated even though it has more than enough pixels it could be because of filtering methods or anti-aliasing, generally you want to adjust the size so that it is a closer match to what you need, but it sounds as if you have done that. So trying something like mipmaps or changing filtering methods could help. mipmaps will make the same asset visible in different resolutions basically (will make the texture size slightly larger, but performance and quality can definitely be improved). Here it would probably be good to keep the texture size at 2^n Another potential option nowadays is to keep the size uneven anyway, you don't need to do 2^n for all assets if you are running into trouble with it, and if you fit it into a sprite sheet but keep the sprite sheet at powers of 2 then I don't think it actually matters (this could be less beneficial if you actually want to use mipmaps and stuff).

@@Nonsensical2D Hey thank you for your detailed answer. I know the blog and I tried a lot of different settings, inport sizes etc.. I think the mipmapping is too much for my game. Its true, that the 2^n-rule dont effect anything. As far as a noticed. I think its all about finding the right balance between blurry sprites and too sharp sprites, which can look jaggy. And when you look close to other professional games, some sprites and textures are also a little bit blurry or jagged. Thank you and keep going

I make a ballpark estimate of the size and try to make it like 5-10% bigger at most (unless I do twice the size). But focus first on making it not blurry. I know when I used to use unity (I don't know if you do) that I had trouble with some import settings that made my assets blurry even if they were the correct size, but it was truly a long time ago so I can't remember what the issue was at the time. But if the asset looks good and not blurry as a PNG, then it should look good in game as well (assuming correct size) and if it doesn't, it is probably due to some import setting or lossy compression that is causing the issue (this could happen in any engine you are working in, be it gamemaker, unity, godot etc)

Another comment he replied to is scaling it in the game engine. Cuz he usually needs the higher resolution for the asset and the engine works fine doing the hard labor.

I will make more videos that touch on this, but I have two videos that kind of touch on this type of stuff already, one called how to place your assets and one called how to make your scene from scratch. it might not be exactly what you want since I don't really cover any engine related stuff, but I kind of touch on some general thoughts in regards for placing and making assets :)

@@Nonsensical2D Thanks I will search for those first then!

Ye, I think that is probably the easiest way to solve it. I dont really think there is an easy way, its kind of the downside with using lineart

Thanks :) No problem, I am aware of it, it in part happens because the text on my teleprompter is on the edge of what is possible for me to read, which is why in my recent videos I have glasses :D but also I don't like looking directly into my light source (which is pretty much where the camera is) so I sometimes naturally strain my brows because of it :) basically I try to be cognisant of it because I know how it comes across, and I do it slightly less often nowadays :) Thanks for the feedback :)

Those are just really simple blocks that I made. Just make a canvas 32x32 or 64x64. then make the corners and edges of the pixel black (with 1 pixel depth), and fill it with grey. Nothing special, just useful to indicate how many blocks you have/need

I tend to make them something like twice the size i need them for. so if the bush is going to look like 128x128, then i make it 256x256 and later export it at 128x128. you can probably go 4096 or even up to 8192 for sprite sheets without it causing any real issues depending on hardware and target platform, just as long as it makes sense (the sprite sheet is actually being used in its entirety) I think all modern platforms should handle 2048x2048, even mobile phones at this point, you just have to be aware with such sizes that you can't have too many of them, your game should probably be able to run on 2gb vram, so it could be worth checking the debugger how much you are using. But you also don't have to use a sprite sheet, a lot of this is about making a judgement call for what you think is best for your game, if you do something really wrong, you'll most likely notice it because either it will look really ugly and bad, or the game will lag or not run properly.

@@Nonsensical2D understood, now I’m getting the hang of it. Appreciate it!!

@@Nonsensical2Dow do you usually resize(reduce) the resolution of sprites or assets without losing too much quality. You mentioned about reducing the size of a bush from 256x256 then export to 128x128, how do I do that? Is it from the procreate itself or photoshop? I’ve made a sprite with a size of 512x512 and I want to reduce it to let’s say 256x256. My art type is line art like HK style and I created it on procreate. A response would be much appreciated =)

@@goofedhunter It depends a bit. if you use godot and i think unity as well, you can just limit the size in the import of the asset. so that the asset that you have will be 256, but godot will only import it at 128. But if I export it as smaller, then I resample the canvas, export it and then redo (cmd+z) so that I am back to the original size (its very important that you redo this step in procreate, since if you ever click away from the sprite you will forever be stuck with that downsampled version. technically you could do a duplicate if you want to be safe)

@@Nonsensical2D that make sense but quality drops a lot when you downscale even using the power of two. Hollow knight characters are very sharp, is it because they draw it at a high resolution like 1080x1080 and reduce the resolution? How can I lower the resolution without losing too much quality? Does it have to do with anti aliasing?

So I don't quite know if this question is related to game dev or general art, So I'll answer both. In game dev terms I don't think it is necessary to think in terms of DPI. DPI specifically refers to dots per inch, which is a term that can be important when printing your work (because you are trying to figure out how many pixels/dots you need to have for a specific physical size of your print). But when you are making a game you are trying to target a specific resolution screen, 720/1080/1440/4k etc. And the only thing that matters when drawing is that the pixel dimensions of your sprite matches how much space you want that asset to occupy on the screen (so if you want it to occupy 1/10 of the screen you want it to have the dimensions 108x192) If you are working in unity you have a term that is kind of similar to DPI called PPU that needs to be handled in order for the physics to work out properly (I think), but that is an engine specific thing that comes after you have finished drawing your sprite. If you want to understand how to set this scaling so that it works out well I recommend reading a unity blog post called "Choosing the resolution of your 2D art assets", it basically deals with this question quite well. So for game dev I don't really think DPI matters, but when it comes to prints or general art I think people make a bigger deal about it that is necessary. Generally people will regurgitate that you need 300 DPI, which I think is a printing standard in magazines. But if you are printing something yourself, I think you have to take into account what the viewing distance is. Since you are about half a meter away from a magazine, 300DPI makes sense, but if you are hanging a painting on the wall you can generally get away with 100-150 DPI without any issues since you are almost never seeing the painting from a distance closer than 2 meters anyway (so you can't make out the details anyway). Basically I tend to think of it in terms of matching what I think "looks good" given the context. But if you ask other people, they'll probably give you the 300DPI answer, it will ensure that it always looks sharp, but personally I think it can be overkill at times.

@@Nonsensical2D I see! Thank you for the thorrow answer I really like getting detailed answers like this! I'm currently facing issues I have a 2K screen a 2560x1600 and I did what You siad with measuring the screen etc and I got the size of "200x200 or 256x256 for my main character but he still looks pixelated...not at all as crisp as your avatar. What am I doing wrong what am I not thinking about? All I want is doing crisp art assets :/

I think Krita is a fairly good free software, I have on occasion preferred it over photoshop even. I generally use Affinity Photo (one time fee) on the computer nowadays (and aseprite for pixel art), but I don't really use it for game art, but if I were to draw game art using a screenless tablet it would probably personally be Krita or Affinity (most likely affinity).

One way to do it is to resample the canvas as half as big, then export it, then redo the resampling (to ensure you didn't minimize the image permanently), it's a bit cumbersome though. You can technically also only import the image into your engine as smaller, that way your image will still be 'high res' in file, but won't slow down performance, (i don't think this is good if you will never make use of the higher resolution though).

Are you using unity? Cause you have a measurement setting in unity, measured in units. And then you also have a pixels per unit setting. It is possible that your ppu or unit size of your character is really tiny. (Assuming you use unity)

@@Nonsensical2D no I'm not. And I'm still only talking about procreate the game art looks not good within procreate.

Ohh ok, i know what you mean then. I have no idea why it happens to be honest. I tend to try and work around it, but i also get the same issue with pasting

Ye I don't think it should be a problem. Just make the asset for 1440p and then you can scale it down in engine (with mipmaps or just normal lineart filtering import depending on your situation and game). Overall I don't expect any issues with artifacting to occur, just make Sure to scale down rather than up.

@@Nonsensical2D I will try that! Thanks for the reply.

you can copy your character into the document where you have the asset. So if your character is 128x128 and you are creating a Tree asset, just place your character next to it in the drawing document. Since you have the character as a reference point you will see if the tree is too big or too small in relation to the character. If you keep doing this for basically all assets you will ensure that all assets look correct in relation to the character and subsequently to each other

I mean you at that point you either have to upscale it or just let it be 720, it will still be playable on a 1080p or 4k monitor, since those resolutions scale evenly, but it'll probably look a bit blurry. (which might be fine if you target 720, it'll kind of be like playing a KZfaq video on 720p, a bit less sharp, but still works)

honestly it is going to depend a lot on your aspirations and preferences. if you want to work at a company in the future then unity/unreal is probably the way to go. If you are doing 2d, then unity/godot/gamemaker is probably easier. I don't think it is the end of the world switching so if you pick 'wrong' and try it out for a few months but don't like it, you will still have learned a lot of useful skills. I personally prefer godot significantly to unity, but I don't think unity is bad to work with and it definitely has its advantages. Godot is still in a bit of a hobbyist phase, and there hasn't been that many 'successful' games released with it yet.