Figuring out asset sizes for 720 HD Game-please help Thread

Hello,

I'm making my first serious game and am now in the phase of getting people to create HD art for the game from my placeholder prototype version. I have no idea what size I need these assets created. This is a critical time of course because I don't want to put all the work into making animations then realize its being done at the wrong size.

My biggest question lies with how much ram I can expect to be ok with asking from a cpu as well as how much, if any, upscaling I can get away with to conserve memory without sacrificing visual integrity.

Here is a screen shot of my placeholder art in the target 720 resolution window. The pirate guy takes up 250 px tall even though he was originally created at 78 px tall. So he was upscaled way too much to fill the screen because at the time I didn't know how much of the screen I wanted filled

Is the correct approach to create the HD art at 250px tall exactly at the size he appears here?

Is it ok to create the HD art at 180px tall instead of 250 and upscale it the rest of the way to fill that space to save memory? I ask this because I created a test version where I scaled up all my graphics to be at size and when two different characters are loaded, the whole game it takes up 1.3GB of memory. I'm not sure if this is too much and if I should reduce the size and upscale to save memory.

Thanks!

Edited by: RisingSpiritVG

Hi Kupo15, I am going to jump to conclusions and assume you are making this for a PC / Windows. Otherwise I really can't tell you

The graphics for a game are primarily managed by the video cards memory, not the systems memory. Also if all of the graphics won't fit into the video RAM it will overflow into the system memory and be accessed with AGP. You don't need to know or care about any of this. To cut it short. You want your graphics to be put on what are called "Sprite Sheets" A sprite sheet is usually a perfectly square graphics image. This is usually a requirement by the graphics card. So if you want to put a 1280x720 screen image up you need to store it in a sprite sheet that is square, and an even multiple of the power of 2. So 2048x2048. That is good though because you can store more than one fullscreen image and lots of smaller sprites.

You could do all this by hand with Adobe photoshop, but that is a pain in the ass. Most people make their graphics and then use a program like "Texture Packer" to create the sprite sheets. Here is a link about sprite sheets, but it might be overwhelming. 90% of the info you don't care about.

Anyhow, I hope this helps you out! - Randell Trulson

www.NeuronGames.com