Other video games, fantasy art, comic book art, old cartoons, classical paintings, etc.

I look at a lot of older games all the way from Amiga to Sega Genesis to Arcade.

I also break down games, record videos, analyze animation frames in photoshop, study sprite sheets, and do experiments and sketches.

I study whatever games I think mine will play like. There's quite a long list because each game has some aspect that I like. For example, maybe I like the simple walk animation in one game, or maybe I like the sword play mechanics in a game. I use them for reference, not to copy, but to have a starting point.

I'll list a few I guess:

samurai shodown (arcade)

x-men (genesis)

golden axe series (arcade)

shadow of the beast (amiga and genesis)

altered beast (genesis)

revenge of shinobi (genesis)

most old fighting games (x-men vs street fighter, king of fighters, etc.)

kid chameleon (genesis)

chakan (genesis)

ranger x (genesis)

super castlevania iv (snes)

symphony of the night (ps1)

Hmm, that article seems to be more about gameplay and getting your own copyrights.

I need to know specifically about naming a game so I can get that out of the way and get to work on title screen graphics and whatnot. Not that I'm anywhere near completion. I just started. But might as well attach a name to it.

When you are naming your game, how do you know if it is okay to use the name you pick?

Obviously, if a big name game has the same name, then it would be out, I assume, especially if your game is similar. Probably can't use it either if a popular movie uses it I guess.

However, if our game doesn't have anything to do with those things, can we still use it?

Made up Example: a game or movie called "The Death of War" has been out for some time, but is about WW2 or something. Our game is a medieval game about samurai or something. Can we use that title?

For my actual game, all I saw was some crummy game on Sploder that happened to have the same title. It looks like some generic free-ware game though.

Obviously, this is for games that are going to sell or at least put on major platforms (steam, windows 8, whatever).

Good artwork is sometimes all people have to go by. When you stumble on a random game while searching, the first thing you will see is promotional artwork or screenshots. If you click a video, you are are still looking at art, just with sound and whatnot.

It seems like it would pay to have a great presentation. If you are going to spend a long time making a game, might as well make the presentation good as well. That means title screen art, game art, icons, or anything else you can use to get people's attention.

We're going to investigate this further shortly and will let you know what we find. We've heard Windows 8 apps should be compatible with the XBox One, so it might be possible.

That sounds pretty cool. Since my first game is aimed at PC, porting it to XB1 should be a no brainer. It seems like a good, easy way to make some more sales. :)

I was originally going to get GMS, but then I found out about C2 and it seemed more my style. I want to spend my time doing art and music, not programming. Nor do I want something that's going to take a long time to learn. Of course, even C2 has a learning curve, but it hasn't been that bad.

I would also like to see the tabs keep the order I set, or at least have some sort of logical order to make it less messy.

After doing some experimenting, here are a couple things I've noticed (possibly).

1. Image size is more important than sprite size. In other words, a small 100px image enlarged to 500px in C2 is better than a simply using a 500px image.

2. Copying and pasting a sprite does not seem to add to memory use, but does add to object count. So, we should still be careful how many objects we use even if they are the same sprite copied and pasted.

Does this seem correct?

Fortunately I found out that you could just batch resize images in the project directory to a higher resolution (using nearest neighbour image interpolation in Photoshop), and all assets (except spritefonts and tiled backgrounds if you use them) retained their stage size, and I was able to disable point sampling for a comparably crisp effect.

I've never been able to resize images in Photoshop CS5 without at least some pixel shift. No combination of settings seemed to work. Things would always be a little bit 'off'.

Now, resizing in C2 works just fine though. All pixels retain their exact positions.

DrewMelton - Set your HUD items to viewport locations via events to ensure they are always onscreen while using scale-inner. A little extra work for a lot of extra reliability.

Cool, I have no idea how to do that, but hopefully I can find a tutorial somewhere. I'm still new to C2.

Well, I had the fullscreen mode set to "scale inner." It seemed to produce the best results. I just hope nothing gets cut off. I don't plan on having much HUD, but the HUD or the title screen would be my only concerns for getting cut off.

Scale outer seemed to show too much of the outside, so I'd have to modify the back ground to go off the edge a bit.

Letterbox scale seemed to work, though it always showed a letter box even if it was the same resolution as my desktop (1920x1080). So, I don't know why that is. I thought it would only show a letterbox if the resolution didn't match the monitor.

The others didn't seem to be what I wanted.

I also don't know why it says "fullscreen in browser" as opposed to just fullscreen. As far as I know, the game will not be running on a browser when I export the final game. I want to put it on Steam and maybe a mobile platoform.

Cool, thanks.

My pc monitor is 23" and 1080p. The game looked fine when full screen in Chrome no matter what resolution I picked. The only difference was how much stuff I could see at once, and that is entirely dependent on how large I resize the sprites.

I'll probably stick with lower resolutions. It seems to work fine.

If we are doing pixel art, is there any reason to use higher resolutions (window size)?

For example, a typical character in pixel art might be 100px tall. Now, if we use a low resolution (window size) such as 480x853 or 540x960 then everything is about the right size when displayed on my monitor. Maybe some things need to be enlarged a little.

Or I could increase the window size to a higher resolution like 1280x720, but this would mean using C2 to enlarge each sprite.

If there is no benefit to working at higher resolutions, then I figure it's best to just work at a lower resolution and let it all upscale when it is played. That'd be easier than having to resize every sprite to double its size to fill out the window. What do you think?

Everything will probably have to be resized anyway since pixel art is usually pretty small, but with lower resolutions, it wouldn't have to be resized as much.