Large sprites in a smaller game

Hello!

I'm working on the final boss of my game. Most of my game's sprites are really small. My main character is only 8 pixels wide and 16 tall. I'm wanting to make the final boss really big though, he'll probably be about 617 pixels tall and 788 wide, and, since he's bigger, he'll need more frames of animation for his movements.

I don't really know too much about file sizes. With one frame of the boss in, my c3p file is 50,366 kb.

I'm not sure what I should be going for file size-wise. What's the average size of a game in Construct 3? Are there any reasons, besides increasing the file size, like lag or loading times that might come from having a bunch of sprites that size?

This is probably kind of a silly question, but I haven't really dealt with big sprites before.

What is your target resolution? 8px for player and 700px+ for boss is going to look very odd.

If you boss is going to be 617px tall then I assume that your target resolution is at least 1152x648 or possible 1920x1080.

Does your boss need to be that big? Can you draw it at a smaller size and then scale it up or will that not work with your artstlye?

The larger the sprite size you import the more memory you will use, and typically will increase your download size.

Thanks for your reply!

The boss is going to be realistic compared to everything else. I made a miniature that I'm taking pictures of.

I hadn't really thought of a target resolution. This probably isn't how you're supposed to do it, but my viewport size for most of the game is 128 x 96 pixels. For the final boss I used set canvas size and multiplied the size by 8.

What would happen when too much memory is used? Would that lag out the game?

The boss doesn't really move all that much. I might be able to separate some of his pieces, so that when his cape animates the body isn't repeated in the frame. I'm not sure how much of a difference that will make though.

The sprite in question isn't exactly large by todays standards, relatively speaking. The size of your viewport doesn't really matter as far as the device is concerned. However it might cause memory issues if you have a lot of animation frames (it also might not, it really depends on how many frames it contains). Your idea of splitting up the boss into multiple pieces is a good idea and a fairly common technique to optimize memory usage in other games. If there are significant areas that do not need animation, it can make a huge difference in memory use, especially as your frame count increases.

Running out of vram can cause your game to either fail to load, crash, or otherwise run at extremely low fps.

Thanks! I'll split him up and see how that goes.

I split him up and added some placeholder animations to approximate how many frames will be there when I have the final animations in.

Is there a way to check vram in debug mode? I don't know if GPU is relevant at all, but it's hovering around 1% and there isn't any lag which is good.

It's "estimated image memory" in debug mode. Available vram varies wildly per system, and some can share with system memory. I'd say keep it under 1g at any given point to be safe, but it depends on the target system requirements you are aiming for.

Remember layouts can also be used to manage memory. Only images used in the current layout are kept in memory.

Cool. Mine's at 57.6mb so it looks like it'll be okay. Thanks so much for your help!