I’m working on the artwork for a Zelda style top down game. My map is getting pretty large at this point, and since I’m painting everything in photoshop, it has quite an organic feel.
My question is, can I paint each screen shot by hand and load each screen easily as the player walks through the map, or do I need to think more about creating tiled graphics to make the overall game size smaller and easy to load or download?
I want it to have an organic feel in the end, with subtle gradients of haze, shade, etc. I’m not entirely sure if that is doable in Unity (I don’t have Unity yet), or if I would need to paint all of those effects in Photoshop first. I want to make sure I set it up right the first time, rather than have to go and redo everything from scratch.
I’ve attached a link to some small thumbnails of the game so far. I’m an artist by trade, so I don’t know much about the technicals.
Creating individual artworks for each level will take both a lot of time and a lot of memory in your game. Tiles will take up much less space but mightn’t create the same feel you’re going for. That said, clever use of tiles can hide the fact that they’re tiles completely and can still be used to create a beautiful game.
based on your art work, i would stick with that and not go for tiles. yes its true that tiles are technically more efficient and what not, but i think u would have a hard time easily converting to that and still remaining effective and keeping your original vision.
i can think of lots of older games that had each screen drawn on its own, and they worked great back then. depending on the size of your images though may cause some performance issues. but that would also depend on if they are huge scrolling backgrounds or single screen backgrounds, as well as how many you have.
so think about what kind of scale you are going for, approx how many screens, how big they are etc, and determine what you think would work best.
Before you start producing final art or too much art, you want to clarify your technical requirements. Not in crazy detail or anything, but enough that you know what you will need to know. It is all to easy to get engrossed in the visual aspect and start cranking away at maps/levels/characters/etc, (let’s face, that is really one of the more fun parts). Only to find much later that you have to heavily modify/change/re-think the art based on requirements.
Mobile is a good example. Resolution on tablets are higher than consoles/typical PCs. But the memory is much more limited. You have to get tricksy with the art to build it in way to maintain high fidelity yet still perform.
Tiling is not “required”, but as StewartB said, it can be done creatively and in a way that isn’t obvious that allows you to keep a high quality look.
Why not just paint your screens as suggested then slice them in to tiles? With a little bit of coding you can force an array to only show the tiles that would be visible on screen. You could also allow 1-2 tiles extra to be drawn outside the screen bounds to prevent tile popup.
Thanks for the responses everyone. I was thinking of doing this. I estimate that I would have around 2000 individual screens of artwork though, so I’m worried that it will be a huge download. Maybe I need to work out a tiling system to make things easier.
I wouldn’t worry about tiling too much. Paint your art. Slice them in chunks of let’s say 500x500 (background art) and keep everything else on a different layer to export as another single sprite(s). What you may want to think about is level size/length. In “The Other Brothers” we had to be careful not to go too big with the level design or we would face device ram limitations.
Thanks for that insight Thomas. I’ve also noticed a Unity video demonstrating the use of combining multiple sprites into a level design, where you can then distort the graphics in the way you want. If I could reuse a set of “cliff/rock” graphics for example, I would be able to get a lot of variation without having to use 100’s of files. It seems there are now ways to use Unity in a way that you can reuse the same sprites, but in an organic way that creates larger “unique” looking images.
On another note, I’ve seen the example of The Other Brothers, and I was really admiring it!! That game looks fantastic! Bravo! I’d love to find out more about how you went about making it. Are there any articles or other videos you can direct me to?
Hey again nbw888 - There are currently no articles/videos of the making of “The Other Brothers” so I am sorry to say I don’t have a link or anything. Feel free to PM me if you have any specific questions and if time permits I am happy to answer questions.
One of the main things to consider is how you’re going to deal with memory. If you don’t have enough memory to load every single image in at once, then you need some kind of spooling from disk. Then you have to consider how slow it is to read a whole image from disk, plus how slow it is to send the texture over the graphics bus to the video card… suggesting you’d have to break your image up into much smaller tiles so that you can get a smooth framerate, and load in one tile per frame or something.
In “The Other Brothers” we had a self written culling system for that. Rob (Hippocoder) did an excellent job managing all the technical stuff so we (the artists) could go nuts (within reason).
Whether to use tiles depends on what you’re doing. The pics you have on your site remind me of adventure games like Monkey Island and so on…if you’re doing a flick-screen game where every scene is essentially a unique painting, there’s no point using tiles.
I would want the camera to pan along with the player. Here’s a great example of a game that does this: Hyper Light Drifter.
I also wonder if they’re using tiles or just making the level with a bunch of preset sprites for the ground, stones, etc. etc.? It looks kind of random, but you do see elements repeating here and there.
If you want the kind of movement shown in that video, I don’t think the fixed background/scene idea probably isn’t going to cut it. Some sort of tile and sprite system, or perhaps 3D geometry with some vertex blending, decals and post process effects might get the look your after. It’s quite hard to say without spending time running tests on what can/can’t be done vs how it looks.
Really nice art style though - I get a bit of a Superbrothers: Sword Sworcery EP vibe from it, but obviously less pixel-ly
