Graphics Sizing of HD Bitmap/Raster graphics in GameMaker

JEMcG

Member
Hi! I'm quite new to gamemaker and still learning my way around.

I'm eventually looking forward to making a game, with my partner drawing the artwork. She'll be drawing digital art on the iPad Pro using Procreate (she's open to other software). All of it will be bitmap/raster graphics (as opposed to Vector). We feel this will suit the style and skillset we have.

I was planning to make the game at 1080p, though allow this to be changed up or down depending on how practical this would be to implement. I'll also mention that the animation involved will only be small (think Final Fantasy Tactics or Disgaea style idle, walking, and attack animation, minus the fancy ones).

I've seen a lot of people saying this might not be practical given that graphics stretch and pixel/vector are the way to go.

My question is: will it be possible to have this look good without hogging a shed load of memory? If so what sizes would you say we draw the assets.... would we go quite large so they do not need to be stretched or would this take up too much resource in game? Or attempt to draw them as close to how they would look at 1080p?

We're happy to mess around once I'm deeper in the programme but we will be making a lot of art and I don't want her to have to redraw tons of it due to sizing errors.

Thanks for any help!
 
It's certainly possible, there are a few games made or being made in GM that have quite high quality art. I myself generally try and make my games(mostly jam games) higher resolution, I develop in 1080p and have code to scale the surface down for people with smaller resolutions.
With really high resolution assets you may need to do some extra work in regards to texture pages, but your other option is to reduce the size of your assets a wee bit, try and find a good balance of quality and size.
That said, I'm pretty sure you would be fine with a less action-intensive game like the ones you mentioned. So yeah, it's certainly possible, maybe just play around with it and see how it goes. Also, good luck(I love the idea of working with your partner and I'd love to see the results!)
 

JEMcG

Member
It's certainly possible, there are a few games made or being made in GM that have quite high quality art. I myself generally try and make my games(mostly jam games) higher resolution, I develop in 1080p and have code to scale the surface down for people with smaller resolutions.
With really high resolution assets you may need to do some extra work in regards to texture pages, but your other option is to reduce the size of your assets a wee bit, try and find a good balance of quality and size.
That said, I'm pretty sure you would be fine with a less action-intensive game like the ones you mentioned. So yeah, it's certainly possible, maybe just play around with it and see how it goes. Also, good luck(I love the idea of working with your partner and I'd love to see the results!)
Thank you so much for your reply. I've not messed about with the resolution stuff too much yet, but the scaling code you've mentioned sounds interesting.
I'll look into that kind of thing. Would be okay if I shot you a message if we need to once we get that stage? (I expect it will be a long while yet).

For now I guess we'll make it around the size we would want for 1080p and see how it fits.
So I take you don't worry too much about making them run at 2k or 4k?

We're very new to this but once we get the project to a stage we want to show I'll make sure you know!
 
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