Enlarging Sprites

[dreichelt]

Hi I'm making a zelda game for myself and was wondering how you go about scaling up the sprite art with out losing quality? Or is there a quick method of recreating the pixel art by hand using the sprite sheet as a template?

[~Axis~]

As long as you scale up proportionaly, you wont loose it's quality. Like x2, x4, x6 etc. If you try to do it manually though, you'll definately loose quality and I dont think there is a quick way of recreating it by hand.

[dreichelt]

Yeah I just tried by hand and it was a nightmare lol. Actually I found a great quick tutorial here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58TLD2NombUu

[Kelvin]

Don't scale up your sprites. You'll just end up with partially-overlapping pixels when things move around, which looks kinda ugly when you start noticing it, and it increases file size and memory usage.

What engine are you using? Most game engines come with methods to increase the window size or even go fullscreen built in, so a small view shouldn't be a problem, and it'll help keep from wasting memory. Even if your game is small, it's always a good idea to only use up memory you need, cuz if you get into a bigger project, you're gonna find that every byte counts.

[dreichelt]

I'm using Gamesalad. I got the sprites off here but they were so so small and I don't think GameSalad has a way to upscale with out blurring the graphics. I just upscaled to the size I want the character to be which is 256 x 256 pixels. It's only a Zelda game for myself so I wouldn't be uploading it to any app stores.

[puggsoy]

Do you mean upscaling in-game programmatically? If so, I don't know if it's possible to do so, most engines blur it.

However, if you want to upscale the graphics before putting them in the game, you can do so without blurring it. With GIMP, you can upscale by 200% (or any multiple of 100%) with interpolation set to "None" (Photoshop and other programs probably have similar settings), and it won't blur it. If you upscale it to a weird number though, like 137%, it still won't necessarily blur it, but the sprites will look weird and not very pleasant.

[dreichelt]

Yup I used photoshop. I included a link to a video I found above but essentially the process is: Image size> adjust to your size, instead of bicubic Automatic from the drop down menu choose Nearest neighbor (preserve hard edges)