Hi guys.

I'm working on an XNA tech demo, and I'm getting to the point where I'll need to settle on the look and hire an artist. It'll definitely be a 2D game, but I'm a bit uncertain about the details.

At full resolution, XBox 360 games run at 1280x720. Now most of the entities in my game are (roughly) 36x36 pixels, with relatively few animations. In addition, these animations consist of somewhat subtle changes between the individual frames, making them quite suitable for pixel art. Larger entities also exist, ranging from 128x128 to 310x310. These sizes might be pushing it a bit, but they don't have as many animations and would probably still be doable in the same pixel fashion.

Now the backgrounds is where I'm a bit conflicted. I expect the backgrounds to be relatively empty and purely aesthetic, with little to no scrolling (meaning that each background would be 1280x720, with perhaps one or two exceptions). Since they do not need to scroll, they would most likely not be tile-based. Some decorative pieces would be nice to randomly scatter around the edges of the field, but that's about it. Still, these are very large sizes that might be outside the realm of pixel art.

What concerns me is having a consistent look, so I wouldn't necessarily want the backgrounds to be hand-painted as it might create an awkward contrast between them and the animating entities. I suppose I could try to go the hand-painted route the whole way much like David Hellman did with Braid (http://www.davidhellman.net/blog/the-art-of-braid-index/), but Braid had very little animations, and none of them were squeezed into 36x36 sprites.

Do you guys think such a game would be doable entirely in pixel art? Or would hand-painted backgrounds still look OK with pixel entities? Do any of you have experience creating higher-res pixel art?

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

You're welcome.