8 Bit Retro Game Effect

Hi there,

I am trying to make an old school retro 8 bit style game, because these games are my love! :)

So I think about the graphics for my game.

I tried to make very small sprites and use the "Set scale" option of Construct 2 to achieve a pixelated look. But this doesn't look this nice every time and the platform behavior feels kinda strange this much zoomed in. It kinda lags sometimes.

Also I was thinking maybe its better to make the sprites bigger and just display the game at normal scale.

Does anyone know wether this shows in performance etc?

Is it better to have small sprites but the zoom or no zoome and bigger sprites?

you can set to scale the image manually using fireworks or corel draw, for example, and when there, just check the option "nearest pixel" in the method of scaling, otherwise, the software will smooth the edges, losing the retro effect of pixel arts.

I did my SandBOX using the scale in game, but I have no idea of how it can show on other computers, so, to make sure the people playing your game will see what you see in your development, just scale the images and import them.

That's what I thought about. Just using bigger images with rescaling them manually...

Do you know what effect the ingame scaling has on performance?

nooo^

If you use webgl and enable "point" sampling it does not go blurry.

So insert sprites the correct size, and then make them larger inside of construct

It's good to stick to the same multiplication..

in the project im working on at the moment all sprites are *4 size

so an 8x8 sprite appears 32x32

with point sampling and webgl resizing anything keeps the sharp pixel edges.

i'd also recommend switching "pixel rounding" on

Problem is, it looks ugly if you want to rotate something.

I think the best solution would be if C2 had more support for really zoomed-in gameplay.

sqiddster

...but then again if you really wanted to rotate something, it wouldn't be a 8 bit game, right? :)

Anyway, for making "The Convergence" I drew all the sprites then exported them 300% bigger.

But that was before WebGL and point sampling, so I'm not sure if it will work properly. Your game would surely be smaller on the download size!

That's true, and one of the reasons I'm not a fan of pixel graphics! no rotation or resizing! The horror!

As gammabeam mentioned I don't want to rotate the sprites, because it is not like a real 8 bit game.

I have done it so far with the small (16x16) images and set the scale to 3,but it kinda feels strange when using the Platform behavior. It kinda lags...