Sprite Creation/Scaling Best Practices?

[NaiDriftlin]

So, I'm creating a sprite driven game for the PC. 

I have an artist(not me) who can make large and detailed 2D art, but we're having a hard time getting the sprites to look right once we've scaled them down. They lose more than a significant amount of detail once its crunched to the correct size.

After about three hours of fiddling with the camera options, unity scaling, editor(photoshop) scaling, and a few dozen other knobs we're not familiar with, we've come to the conclusion that we have absolutely no idea how to create sprites designed for a sprite based game.

We're aiming for the highest quality we can for modern PC resolutions (1920x1080 - 1024x768), but we seem to be missing some more fundamental knowledge on how sprites actually work.

Are there any resources out there for best practices in creating sprites in high resolution/multiple resolutions?

[unikronsoftware]

Sprites will lose quality if you scale down, there isn't any way around that. If you scale down by 50%, you're displaying 1 pixel for every 4 pixels, so you've lost 3 pixels of data...Scaling up on the other hand will just either make the sprites more blurrier when scaled up (though should look similar as you're displaying at higher resolution), or more pixelated.

Alternatively, if you don't want to scale, and just want to display more information (like Terraria for instance), then you won't loose any quality that way.

If you want to scale, I strongly suggest working at the lowest resolution you'd like to support, and then have a double resolution version you switch to when the resolution is sufficiently high that you start to notice the lack of resolution - or have it as an option somewhere in the game (Sprite/Texture Quality).

As you can imagine, all of this (and how you set up the system for it) really depends on the kind of game you want to make and how you want to display your sprites. I need more info to be able to suggest anything.

[NaiDriftlin]

I thought I was the only one up at this hour.  Really surprised to get a response back so quickly.

Our game is a throwback to side-scroller space(it's not actually in space) shooters.   As such, the camera is railed and the pacing of the game is fixed, so simply showing more game space at higher resolutions would cause a bit more problems than I'd actually like to deal with.

I mean, it's an option, but I'd like to see what we can learn about spriting first.

I think we'll give the lowest resolution some love first, then work our way up from there.   

[zeStudio]

If you do find a tutorial on this topic let me know too NaiDriftlin!

Otherwise I might make one myself once I figure out the best way to approach it and have a few good examples. As it turns out multi-platform development is quite the challenge.

[sebaslive]

and then have a double resolution version you switch to when the resolution is sufficiently high that you start to notice the lack of resolution

Hey Unikron what do you mean by a double resolution? Is this like having a background image for one resolution and doing a Hi Res version of it for another resolution? If so, how would unity know to do the switch in this case?

[unikronsoftware]

Yes.

"If so, how would unity know to do the switch in this case?"
It doesn't, you tell it when to switch.

http://unikronsoftware.com/2dtoolkit/doc/advanced/platform_specific_sprite_collections.html