What is the ideal pixel art size for game assets?

indra.aziz

Hi everyone,

This is newbie question for sure.

I want to make my own game sprites and use it in my games. Currently I'm using Aseprite to draw characters and tiles. I usually draw them in 48x48px. But whenever I import the PNG images and assign it to an actor, it always appear blurry, unless of course I resize the actor to 48x48, but then it gets really small. But if I draw in bigger size, then I wont get the blocky pixel style I wanted. What am I doing wrong here?

Thanks, any input is appreciated!

Socks

@indra.aziz said:
. . . whenever I import the PNG images and assign it to an actor, it always appear blurry . . .

GameSalad uses a bicubic (or maybe bilinear ?) reconstruction filter to interpolate the image pixels when scaling up, the result of this is a blurry image.

@indra.aziz said:
But if I draw in bigger size, then I wont get the blocky pixel style I wanted.

What stops you from using a blocky style when creating larger artworks ? I'm guessing it has something to do with the way Aseprite works ? (I've never used Aseprite), If that's the case then once you have created your artwork in Aseprite you can then open it up into a free image editor like GIMP (or if you have it, Photoshop) and scale the image to the size you need using a Nearest-Neighbour interpolation (in GIMP this is called 'none').

indra.aziz

Ah! Very clear explanation. I will try it immediately.

Thank you very much!

indra.aziz

Hi @Socks I just tried it in both Gimp and Photoshop, worked like a charm. Just what I needed. Thanks again.

indra.aziz

Just an update: Turns out we can scale the sprites directly inside aseprite, and it includes all the frames. Silly me!