So I have been having fun with drawing pixel art objects like floor tiles, and following clever techniques for mixed mapping. Graphicsgale is my pixel creator software of choice, I love how you can even preview animations of certain sprite objects.
I understand creating objects, tiles, doors, chairs etc. but I am a bit confused about two things and there seems to be no question about this online, unless I’m misreading something. Backgrounds and lighting of tiles.
There have been plenty of RPG’s where there’s a static background over which these tiles and objects are layered over. Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Hyper light drifter recently did this. Gorgeous lighting and background coloring techniques they used don’t make sense to me. How would you go about drawing something like this on, say , graphicsgale? Would it have to be a massive image size? I read that takes a lot of memory and would be bad for performance, so that couldn’t be it.
Regarding the objects lighting, in Hyper Light Drifter especially, how do some tiles have beautifully placed lighting like they look seamlessly placed? Are they unique tiles with their own lighting that were just placed there? Or is there some technique that I’m missing here?
My game engine of choice is Unity. How would you achieve the effect of having specific lighting on certain objects placed in certain locations and not on locations where the same objects are placed on? It gives off a gradient effect and looks almost 3-D ish and not pixel shaded. And I’m a huge fan of designing backgrounds with great views and colors.
Here, notice how the lighting looks on the floor and the side with the green and dark green and eventually black. That definitely looks like gradient coloring to me. How do you accomplish this ? All I know is tiling. But you can’t get this kind of coloring with pixel art, can you? Or is there a technique?
Another example is this :
Notice the colors turning from blue to red in the bottom. I really like this effect, and matching pixel art with that color pattern is really interesting. I wanted to know what technique this is.
You can alpha blend sprites, you can also play with using particle materials on sprites. It should be pretty easy to put a gradient on your sprite as well with most image editing software.
Isn’t a sprite basically a tile? Which would be 32x32 px? Or do people draw entire sprites which would be a lot more than just 32x32 like those images above and then put these effects on them and THEN tile them on a map?
‘Sprite’ is generally any 2D texture/image, if your working with Unity2D generally all of your images that appear the way they do in an image file are going to be rendered as sprites is as much of a sprite as
where the latter is a sprite sheet that you would slice into individual sprites. A tile set is technically a sprite sheet as well.
Great. Thank you for the explanation! Based off my screenshots above, I have read that creating large sprites with gradient coloring on them would rack up a lot of memory. How would designers come up with this effect with this limitation in mind? Is there some way of checking when is too much?
