How do I create stylised art games?

Is construct good for making games which don't use tile maps?

Like these designs by Thomas brush..

I can create my own assets like this such as trees, buildings, clouds, bridges, platforms and other foreground/background objects in Photoshop then when I'm happy with the scene, resolution and scale, import and arrange them in construct.

Will this cause complications?

Every tutorial I've seen focuses on tile mapping with pixel art but that's not my strength and before I commit to learning how to use construct I was hoping to understand if it's actually feasible in terms of optimisation and functionality.

Thanks :)

Afaik that should be fine.

Yes absolutely, you would just use sprites instead of tilemaps.

You still need to be careful though as having thousands of sprites in one layout (especially if they're just standing there looking pretty) will tank your FPS. So if you're creating a static background I would lay it out in Photoshop and export it as one sprite.

Also be sure to disable collisions on any static, non interactable, sprites so you can reduce calculations. Also if you have large levels (significantly larger than one screen) then don't forget to turn on render cells on the layers.

You should be good for desktop & web exports then. But not sure about mobile. I've heard on the forums people getting pretty bad FPS and battery life on mobile.

Thankyou for the fast response and advice, it's really exciting to know it can work and I'll try to be mindful of collision and cell rendering.

I notice you said it's best to lay out sprites in Photoshop and where possible export multiple instances on a layer as one sprite, this makes sense - but is it also possible for Construct to export an entire layer (consisting of multiple instances or a sprite) as a single PNG?

Lets say I make a scene in Photoshop first then import those sprites and then expand on the level within Construct by copying the sprites and moving them around, does Construct have the ability to either flatten those sprites as one PNG, or the ability to export the layer as a PNG for referencing in Photoshop?

It's good to know this as I absolutely will define the levels resolution and complete layout solely in Photoshop if Construct cannot perform these functions, to save time.

Thanks again!

yea I don't think it matters if the collision is enabled or not if you don't have anything that does a collision check on them.

Also exporting large images is also not ideal depending on the circumstances, it's a bit more complex, so having invidual sprites that you reuse might be better:

https://www.construct.net/en/blogs/construct-official-blog-1/remember-not-waste-memory-796

Thank you, this link is very interesting and answers all my questions!

Thank you all for your help :)