Background Sizes

[milo39]

Hi,
I am making a visual novel but I'm not sure how big to make the background art.
I want the backgrounds to be to be around this size http://www.salehachowdhury.com/uploads/ ... m_orig.jpg
What would your recommendations be? I would appreciate any help.

[Draziya]

Backgrounds should generally match the resolution of the visual novel itself! Ren'py doesn't automatically adjust image size, so if this isn't the case the image might not cover the whole screen, or only a bit of it will be seen.

[Sarchalen]

Well,that image is about 900x500 pixels, so you want it to be about that big??

Whenever I commission backgrounds I always get them done at A4 size, 3150x5600. This is pretty big, but theres a reason for that. Over the past 20 years, computer screen resolutions have changed alot. I remember playing VNs on a 600x800 CRT monitor. At the time, that was the normal size. But now we've moved way beyond that. We have 720x1280 (720p) and 1920x1080 (1080p) monitors as pretty much standard. Of course theres bigger too coming out, 4k, but not everyone has those yet.

When you do digital art, your best resolution will always be whatever the original canvas size was. You can always downsample to fit on smaller screens, but you can never get more pixels out of a small image. It just makes it blurry. So my logic is, draw it big, then sample it down to fit with today's tech, but have the originals prepared for the future when we want better graphics. If you do this right, 10 years from now your game will still look great!

So I'd say have the BGs commissioned at 5100x3150 (this is a little more than 5k) and then sample them down to 1920x1080 when they go into the game. It's also helpful to make the backgrounds a little bigger than the display, so you can do cool things like pan around the BGs and still cover the whole screen, or do parallax effects. If you make the background big, you can move your camera around without zooming in and making it blurry.

[PeterKmiecik]

Sarchalen got the point. I'd only add that to take additional research when developing on other platforms. Mobile is whole another story. Make BG wider horizontally as phones crop out stuff.

[puppetbomb]

As mentioned by Sarchalen, it's always better to have a large source image you can downsize. I usually work 2x-4x the size of the in-game asset for everything, just in case the size needs to be tweaked later.

Also, I'm curious about the aspect ratio you've chosen.

9:5 is a non-standard aspect ratio and may have a higher chance of visual bugs.

If a 9:5 aspect ratio isn't a major feature of your VN, I would recommend working in 16:9. Many monitors and TVs display in this resolution, it's pretty much the only aspect ratio people use for Steam games, and it's also an international standard.

[milo39]

As mentioned by Sarchalen, it's always better to have a large source image you can downsize. I usually work 2x-4x the size of the in-game asset for everything, just in case the size needs to be tweaked later.

Also, I'm curious about the aspect ratio you've chosen.

9:5 is a non-standard aspect ratio and may have a higher chance of visual bugs.

If a 9:5 aspect ratio isn't a major feature of your VN, I would recommend working in 16:9. Many monitors and TVs display in this resolution, it's pretty much the only aspect ratio people use for Steam games, and it's also an international standard.

We went with 2048x1200 for the game, but we have a higher resolution for the backgrounds and sprites if we want to zoom in and do other special effects in the game.
If you want to see the backgrounds some are on our lemmasoft page: viewtopic.php?f=43&t=51063