Recently I was coaching a developer who's new to making pixel art games, and realized there's some "conventional wisdom" around scaling pixel art that's not obvious to a newcomer, and might not be well documented. So, here's an attempt to fix that....
I've heard I should only scale pixel art by 200%, 300% etc. not in-between sizes like 120%
- Why is that? Shouldn't scaling "just work" the way it does with other images?
- What if I really need to make my character just a fraction larger or smaller to get the right gameplay or look? How do I fix this?
I'm told it's "bad" to use pixel art at different scales in one game - why?
- For example, if I scaled up my character so each sprite texel is 4x4 screen pixels, while my background art is scaled up so each sprite texel is 6x6 screen pixels. Isn't a pixel a pixel at the end of the day?