Art - scarbunkle/spnmario GitHub Wiki

So you makes art. Sweet! Programmer art is infamously bad, so this is great. If you're new to video game art, please read this whole page before you get going, so you know if you're making something we can use.

Useful Art Meets Specifications

Every piece of art has specifications it's expected to meet in terms of size. If you're used to creating art at print resolutions, the size specs are going to seem ridiculous. The size is also not 'suggested'. You'll see why when I get to them.

Different Parts Need Different Art

For this project, we don't have large background art. It's part of what makes it easy to code. We have, instead, 2 generic formats art is expected to meet, which we're going to call Tiles and Asset Sheets. Thee specs for them make a lot of sense, and they're not hard to tell apart, but they're very different pieces.

Tiles Are Scenery.

Every tile is an 80x80 square. These form the background of the game, and will be tiled, so they need to be designed with doing that nicely in mind. Here's our placeholder tile: This is not a bad tile, but it's not a good art style for a retro game. Nonetheless, it comes together well (the orange rectangle is our placeholder character): Here is an example of a bad tile: It meets our 80x80 size requirement, but it tiles poorly and distracts from the game. It also makes no sense as dirt.