How to have high quality image?

[Black Cat 2412]

Good day ladies and gentlemen
This sounds like more of a Creator Conner topic, but since it is still about working with Renpy I decided to put it here.
Say, I want my game's image quality to be something like The tutorial or The question (the two games shipped with the engine) or higher. How do I do that ?

My game is also 1280x720. So far I have tried these two methods:
1. Draw the chars' sprites and backgrounds 2 times larger, then scale them down using Photoshop (So the final bg is 1280x720 in pixels)
2. Draw the chars' sprites and backgrounds 2 times larger (So for example my bg will be 2560x1440 in pixels), then scale them down in-game using transform:

Code: Select all

show bg1:
        zoom 0.5

(In both cases, the image resolution-when checked in Photoshop-is 300 pixels/inch)
The result:
1. All of my image got their quality drastically decreased-they got blurry, the color and shading are butchered to pieces,..
2. This works very well and the image looks great, but I'm worried about making my game too heavy and I don't think this is the right method either because when I checked the image directory of the two games mentioned above all of the images there has the screen size (ex: bg in The Question dimension is still 1280x720, yet they look so high-def compared to mine)

SO: Does this mean that when I draw the sprite/bg for my game, I must work with a 1280x720 canvas (Or one with similar dimension) right from the start? If not, then how do I have high quality image in my game?

For visualization, here are some images:
Method 1 (Left) and 2 (Right) (In my computer method 2 looks even better than this)

Yet, method 2 makes the image ragged when I scale the game's window down (This does not happen with method 1)


Thank in advance

[Divona]

What is your method at scale down the image in Photoshop? It could be that you scale it down and set Resample to Bilinear instead of Bicubic Sharper (reduction) or Automatic which results in the method 1 image.

[Black Cat 2412]

I already used Bicubic Sharper when scaling the image down.

[Obscura]

I actually use a command line program called Image Magick (check out imagemagick.org) to scale down sprites because for some reason I got better results than using Photoshop and some other image editing programs. XnConvert is a free tool that might also help...though I found the older versions of it were also inferior to imagemagick when resizing. (It might have improved with newer releases...or maybe I just haven't been using it correctly lol.)

This is what I do in image magick to scale all my images down:

1. once you've installed it, go to the command prompt and change your directory so your are IN the folder containing the images you wish to resize
2. type

Code: Select all

mogrify -path "C:\destinationfolder" -resize x900 -format png *.png

x would be whatever height you want the images

More about image magick commands here: https://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-s ... hp?t=19085 and if you search their forum.