#46418 - cheerio - Fri Jun 24, 2005 2:21 pm
*first post*
alright, well i've been a longtime fan of homebrew apps and all the fancy gadgets for the gameboy. I see a lot of coding but hardly anything on the graphics side. Does this stuff not appeal to graphic designers or typography artists who could have a lot of fun with this sort of stuff...
anyways I wanted to firstly ask, what is the maximum resolution of the gba/ds screen and what do i need to keep in mind with sizes of sprites? I want to play around with size in the constrained space as i few ideas for a character i want and some subtle gameplay.
feel free to check out my site in my profile. not much in the way of pixel art but you can see where i'm coming from.
thanks
Last edited by cheerio on Sun Jun 26, 2005 5:26 am; edited 1 time in total
#46421 - strager - Fri Jun 24, 2005 3:50 pm
DS screen dimentions - 256x192
GBA screen dimentions - 240 x 160
Square sprite sizes range from 8x8 - 32x32
Horizontal sprite sizes range from 16x8 - 32x16
Vertical sprite sizes range from 8x16 - 16x32
Double-sized sprites are possible. This means that the bounding box of a square 8x8 sprite will be 16x16, but only that 8x8 will be shown. The double-sized sprites were designed to handle the cut-off from rotation (of you rotate a box, the edges would normaly be cut off because they hang out of the 8x8 boundry). The downside to double-sized sprites is the fact that they are slow. Do not use to many, or major power will be drained.
Other than that, you're pretty safe, as long as you don't go over the 128 sprite limit.
#46422 - poslundc - Fri Jun 24, 2005 4:02 pm
| strager wrote: |
Square sprite sizes range from 8x8 - 32x32
Horizontal sprite sizes range from 16x8 - 32x16
Vertical sprite sizes range from 8x16 - 16x32 |
Sprites may also be 64x64, 32x64, and 64x32.
| Quote: |
| The downside to double-sized sprites is the fact that they are slow. Do not use to many, or major power will be drained. |
??? I've never heard anything like this. The only negative to using double-sized sprites is that they take twice as many rendering cycles for the GPU on each scanline, because the sprite has to be rendered in a space that is twice as wide. This decreases the number of sprites you can safely display on each scanline before dropoff occurs.
Other things to consider:
- Maximum colours for all of your sprites is 256. If can you can divvy up the 256 colours into 16-colour blocks and restrict your individual sprites to using only one of them at a time, then you will use half the VRAM for your image data, which is a good thing.
- Rotation and scaling are possible, but there are limits to how much you can do them.
- It's a small screen, so try to do more with less space. Yes, sprites can be 64x64, and you can even stitch multiple sprites together to make larger images, but see how good you are at making 32x32 and 16x16 images, as skill at doing smaller stuff is valued on the GBA.
Dan.
#46472 - cheerio - Sat Jun 25, 2005 6:30 pm
another question... any web resources twards setting up sprites? I find character sheets online but i dont know if thats just a compiled image of all the characters poses.
thanks~
#46478 - Kyoufu Kawa - Sat Jun 25, 2005 8:22 pm
| cheerio wrote: |
another question... any web resources twards setting up sprites? I find character sheets online but i dont know if thats just a compiled image of all the characters poses.
thanks~ |
Being a Bob and George afficionado (whatever that word means), I can tell you right here and now that the "sprite sheets" you find on-line are compilations.
In contrast, notice how most old-school platformer characters can be broken down into seperate body parts. Like how Mega Man (MM7 style) has at most five or six heads, and that same character's hair (seen in the intro) is animated by replacing a single 8x8 tile, maybe even just moving it a bit. Same way Roll's ponytail in that same scene is done.
#46484 - cheerio - Sat Jun 25, 2005 10:23 pm
thanks for your reply kyoufu kawa
This is helping me a lot with the way i build my character in photoshop. soon i'll post some in-progress shots
right now my plan is:
head // torso // legs // arms with attached item (he'll only have one item) // shadow ... I think that should be good. with animation in the bounce of his hair, his legs, and then just a shift in a still image of his torso and arms to feel the up and down of his walk.
#46491 - cheerio - Sun Jun 26, 2005 5:23 am
[img]http://www.brendancoyle.com/my sprite d00d.bmp[/img]
http://www.brendancoyle.com/my%20sprite%20d00d.bmp
worked on some angles of a character, i really enjoyed the 3/4 angles more so then the front and back.. ick. ah well. next i supose some more polish and then leg animations
:)
#50014 - therealabdallah - Thu Aug 04, 2005 4:05 pm
| Quote: |
| I see a lot of coding but hardly anything on the graphics side. |
We graphics artists only use the internet when we have no other choice. We are more into taking drugs having sex and playing guitars.