I'm a bit confused as how games handle none pixel art 2D sprites in regards to scaling.
Working on a game at the moment and I'm worried how we'll handle the scale for lower resolutions.
None of the two programmers I'm working on has any experience in this area so I've tried to do a bit of research.
The coding of the resolution scaling is on hold at the moment while I try to find out the correct way to deal with this.

I'm wondering how I'm supposed to design the art assets, do I make them twice the actual size and have the engine scale them depending on user resolution?
Of course as an artist I'd want everyone to see the art at a 1:1 pixel ratio, but that's not realistic, is it?
Also, knowing pixel art I do know the importance of designing low res graphics in low res and how scaling down a high res texture makes it look very undefined in comparison.

I'm hoping there's someone here with experience in 2D engines and designing art assets for them.
Any tips will be helpful!

edit: I guess this is relevant, but these seem to be about upscaling and not downscaling.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_scaling

Don't ask me what kind of bird it is..
All I can tell is that he's well fed :>

So I started working on this a couple of hours ago and now I'm stuck..
I think the left/right sprites turned out ok, but it's still kinda hard to read.
And oh, how I dread the front view animations, I don't even dare to attempt it yet..
Considering how impossible I thought this would be at first, I think I made some progress though.
But I'm unsure if and when both wings should be showing, right now it's just one wing.
And due to the perspective it looks like it's attached to the birds belly..

But any tips on how to do this/improvements would be appreciated.
It's possibly the hardest thing I've attempted so far when it come to pixels/animation.


edit: (jiggly pixel fix)

edit2: Here's an attempt to make the tail feathers waggle up and down, not sure if birds do that, not even sure if it looks good..




edit: *mindblown, I just noticed, by accident that flipping the sprite upside down gives me a simple 2 frame wing flapping animation.. woha..

So I have a few sprite sheets, but since I'm working in photoshop is too tedious to cut and paste them into layers just to test the animation.
Is there a program where you can import sprites and specify the size of the frames and then just easily select what frames you want to animate?

So I started working on a template for RPG characters.
They're a bit influenced by the Cave Story sprites.
I just wanted them to look cute and small, obviously they look a bit childish which I exaggerated on with the hair, skirt and such on the female sprite.

At first I felt really frustrated for choosing 16px (it's for a game and I can't change my mind again and go back to 32px ) because I thought it was really hard to make the hair style.
I think the blond hair turned out pretty ok, but I was going for something else, it's especially hard to make it look like the hair is at an angle, now the bangs are straight but I wanted them to bend downwards.

I'm glad I did this free hand though, I was almost about to look at other sprites because the heads looked really strange at first, but with the shading they started to look decent.
I think I've learned a bit from Pistachio from the other thread (gonna go back and work on my avatar later ) Thanks for that, but feel free to point out any mistakes I've made.

I'm also curious as to how I can make the female sprites more feminine, I tried adding a pixel to the sides of the eyes and also adding more slant to the shoulders. I also changed the shading a bit to make the female sprite appear more slim.

Lessons learned(?): Better contrast, fewer colors for sharpness, outlines broken up a bit.