AuthorTopic: I want to develop 2d top-down JPRG style pixel game. Need help!  (Read 3777 times)

Offline ysy888

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I want to develop 2d top-down JPRG style pixel game. Need help!

Reply #10 on: April 22, 2021, 03:28:02 pm
Just want to point out that I have no experience coding and I am not a professional artist. I've dabbled a bit in Photoshop/Illustrator.

I have plans of developing a top-down RPG style game with a Japanese anime inspired character/world design (Pokemon, SNES JRPGS...etc etc)

However I've noticed that pretty much every game in this style has the overworld or town section too low res for the characters to have any detail. I'd like to have the in-game character sprites hi-res enough so that you can actually feel the anime aesthetic rather than retro JRPG style or "chibi" (simplified cute anime style with huge head, small, body). I'm not a big fan of the "chibi" look and I want to keep the characters proportional and detailed as much as possible.

So the question I want to ask is why is it that even now with modern indie pixel games, the world section is still low res? (For ex. Crosscode)

Is it a stylistic choice because they want to replicate the retro 16-bit era pixel style? Or is it because of hardware or practical limitations?

And I've been doing research for the past few days and have found that for pixel games the sort of standard resolution seems to be 640x360 due to its ability to upscale to 720p and 1080p.

Now I'm still trying to figure out the vertical ration of character sprite to the full resolution, but if you look at the vertical ratio of character sprite:vertical height it comes out to this:

1:3 120px

1:4 90px

1:5 72px

1:6 60px

1:8 45px

It seems like most RPGS I've seen use around 1:6 to 1:18 thus makes the character tiny in the middle of the screen but you can see a lot more of the world and environment.

But as I've said my hope is to have my character sprite be at about this level of detail.

https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/66931841

The girls in this artwork have a vertical height of about 120-130px.

That means at the resolution of 640x360 my main character would take up 1:3 of the height of the entire screen and my world would be a lot more zoomed in than traditional RPGs.

So again my question is why is it that nobody has done this before? (Or have they and I just don't know about it)

Possible reasons I'm suspecting are:

Because the character is too large for a top-down view. The world is hard to navigate(?) because so little of the surroundings can be seen at once on screen?

It isn't practical to do because the world would be too big to draw with pixels. It's just not realistically possible.

Because there's too much animation work due to the increased number of resolution?

Or..just because it's not the norm? There's no reason why it shouldn't work?

If the answer is #1 then is it possible for me to just pick a bigger resolution? Is there a bigger resolution I can use that doesn't cause an issue scaling to 720p & 1080p?

FYI I'm not looking to do mobile. PC and hopefully consoles if possible!

If you took the time to read through this long post thank you!

I don't know anything about game development so any help would be appreciated!