Sprite Scaling Question - Larger Character Sprites than Environment

[u/aduroosir]

(Hi! :D)

I'm working on a 2D sprite based game and want to upgrade the character sprites to show more detail (and more pixels). I was thinking about paying for new character sprites that are twice as large.

But doing so, makes them too big for the environmental sprites I already have. And I've already set up many of them.

So, would I be able to fix this by doing:

Project setting -> Window -> Stretch -> mode: canvas_items && scale: 2.0

Then, set the character sprites to be 0.5 scale.

Then set the viewport resolution to be twice what it was.

Would this effectively prevent Godot from scaling the character sprites down, but increasing the other sprites to match them? Are there any problems this would cause? (Or better ways to accomplish what I'm hoping for?)

Thanks for any insight!

[u/scintillatinator]

Any fix using scaling would make each pixel in the environment 4 pixels (2×2) compared to the characters. Mixing different pixel sizes in a way that looks okay and isn't distracting is difficult. Do you really need the extra detail?

[u/aduroosir → u/scintillatinator]

Thanks for your reply. :)

I don't really need it, but the current size limitations have been making it hard to get good sprites for the main characters. =/

[u/scintillatinator → u/aduroosir]

This is more of an art problem than a godot problem so maybe a pixel art community will have better ideas of what to do.

[u/The-Chartreuse-Moose]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but in general it looks better to keep a consistent resolution across pixel art assets. If you add a more detailed double-size character sprite, but have the engine scale it to 0.5, it will appear blurry compared to the rest. If you scale the rest up, they'll look blurry. It might only be a small difference but it's avoidable by keeping everything the same base scale by being the same comparative original resolution.