Is there any best practice info for creating game art to target multiple platforms?

Camike

I've searched GameSalad and watched a few videos but haven't really found what I'm looking for. I'm hoping someone can give me the answer or point me in the right direction. I want a target as broad as possible in terms of my game being deployed and I want to reduce the amount of time and effort in developing the artwork. This particular game is going to be a side scroller, endless runner variety with flat 2D graphics. I've never used GameSalad before so I am a novice in that regard. I'm very experienced in all other elements such as graphic design, programming and database development. I'll be using 3D Studio Max to model and render the elements and photoshop to create the finished art. I'm hoping to have a single Photoshop file to work from, from which I will generate the files for the game. My question is - "what size should this file be" both in terms of L x W and ppi. Has anyone created a psd template that has layers representing the target sizes and aspect ratios? Can I detect the device & scale sprites dynamically in GameSalad and is this best practice to do so? I'm hoping you can get the gist of my question and I appreciate any help - thanks!

scottharrrules43

Google universal binary for Gamesalad

RossmanBrothersGames

The size depends on your primary target platform. If this is iOS, and you want this to be universal (ipad and iphone) most people recommend choosing the iPad resolution in the project settings as it is easier to make an iPad game scale to iPhone rather than the other way around. Gamesalad will scale sprites for you, the more difficult part is making your game screen change depending on the aspect ratio. (If you had things like onscreen buttons on the edge of a widescreen iphone they would need to be moved in on the ipad that is not widescreen).

So to make your sprites, assuming you are doing ipad, select ipad's resolution in the game settings, and click resolution independence on (this is for HD games). In the scene control the camera will be set to half the size of an iPAD's resolution. I forget the actual dimensions you can look at it within gamesalad, by going to scene attributes, and clicking camera height and width.

From here you can play around with your scene. Lets says you put in an actor and it was 50 x 50 (make sure and use even numbers) and you liked that size for your main character. You would make the artwork for that actor 100x100. With resolution independence, the resolution of images are twice the size of the actor. So for programming purposes the actor is 50x50 but for visual purposes it is 100x100. So you could make a photoshop file that is twice the size of the camera for whatever project resolution you pick and play with the sizes of your images within that to get the look you want.

Socks

@Camike said:
My question is - "what size should this file be" both in terms of L x W and ppi.

The height and width of an image will entirely depend on how big the actor is that you would be applying the image to.

The ppi of an image is largely irrelevant, although 72ppi is recommended as it automates the actor size when dragging an image from the Images panel into the Actors panel, beyond that it's irrelevant.

Camike

Thanks for the quick responses. The "file" I am referring to is the single, Photoshop source file that I will be using to create all of the assets for the game, not any individual player or sprite/element. I want to use a single photoshop file and from that single file I will derive all of my assets for every possible target platform, iPhone, Kindle, Nook, Android this and Android that. I'm thinking that the universal binary is exactly what I'm looking for so I'm going to do a little research on that tonight - thanks everyone.

colander

For universal builds read the instructions in my signature they cover the issues and what needs to be done to create one. I have already developed the code and created a template for overscan. The instructions explain a lot and tell you what the template can and can't do.