I'm going to resize character sprites in my LT fangame, which size do you think is best?

Design
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I’m going to resize character sprites in my LT fangame, which size do you think is best? It’d mean recoding the sprite code to work at a larger resolution and put the text box somewhere else, perhaps where Phoenix Wright on the GBA puts it. It might even be necessary to recode it so that instead of placing a blinking and talking layer over the sprite the whole sprite changes.

Have you ever seen Phoenix Wright? I’m a big fan of that series. Even on the GBA they were able to get so much character and charm out of those sprites. You see characters from the waist up, you get to see more of them than you would if you could only see their faces. There are even big versions of his face for dramatic close-ups where the speed lines behind him are pointing left. Or another direction.

Look at that. That’s character right there. Sure, that’s not official, but it’s as iconic and nostalgic to me as any canon Phoenix Wright mental breakdown scene. That video’s older than my friend’s kids and they called me old last time I babysat for them. You remember that time the coffee guy threw coffee at Phoenix and there was a unique sprite for it? Or the time the wig guy threw his wig at Phoenix and there was a unique sprite for it? Putting big animated character sprites in LT would be epic. I could do that. Probably.

But maybe Phoenix Wright’s sprites aren’t big enough and I need to go bigger. He had bigger sprites in later games on consoles that had bigger screens and a better resolution. Sure, sprites somewhere around 125x142 are great and they still fit in the GBA’s screen, but Awakening’s sprites for characters are 256x256. Awakening had some great sprite art. But it wouldn’t fit the GBA’s pallete limits unless redrawn with that in mind. These huge sprites still look fine to me when resized down to 128x128 and would look better if they were redrawn at that size. And that sprite for the giant Phoenix Head sprite is at least 188x188. I could increase the LT game’s screen size for even bigger sprites but that would mean it wouldn’t look like a GBA game any more. Maybe expanding the screen size into the full 1080p fullscreen experience would look weird with GBA sprites and aiming for the size and technical limitations of another console like the DS or 3DS or Gamecube or PSP/2/1 would be better. The PSP had some great games. Then again the GBA screen size worked fine for some games. Tsukihime was one of the visual novels of all time, I played it in english on the PSP but I’ve heard people had it working on the GBA but in Japanese only. Have you ever seen “Play Novel: Silent Hill”? That was also on the GBA, and in english. Maybe the GBA’s screen size is fine. Maybe. Maybe all the effort I could put into larger sprites would be wasted and I’d end up narrating the content of cutscenes to the audience through a faceless historian narrator character instead of writing out those cutscenes in full to save time.

What do you think of Fire Emblem sprites and screen sizes? What do you consider the best screen size and sprite size for what Fire Emblem is at its best?

edit: Did I go too big with these ones?

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Increasing the screen size is synonymous with decreasing sprite size.

The thing that makes Phoenix Wright’s character sprites so notable is that they fill the screen. There’s no need to be able to have two people in shot, and that in turn dictates that the sprites can be of these incredible sizes.

Look at how Awakening has some difficulties with three and four character conversations, because only two faces can be displayed at once because they take up something like 40% of the screen after the text box is drawn. Look at Yggdra Union, where character sprites are like 60% of the screen sometimes - look at Advance Wars, where a small 32x32 crop of the character’s face is all that’s used for the conversations.

The best size for the character graphics depends on how important it is to show multiple characters at once. If you know you’ll only ever show two at a time, then it’s perfectly good to make them be like 120 x 100.

So, in my opinion, the ‘best size’ is going to be a bit over a third of the screen wide and half the screen tall, as the “large” size that normal characters ought to fit within - for the GBA’s 240x160, a 96x96 box. If they’re much wider on average, you can’t reasonably fit even three people let alone four, and taller, they’d start hitting the text box or screen top if you want to be able to have three lines of text. It does crowd in the top a little, which might look uncomfortable.

image – image

And with four, the spacing gets awkward, like… majorly:
image – image

But I think this is a plenty survivable size. 16 pixels get cut off on the edges, the middle overlap is also only 16 pixels. It’s enough space for the characters to, y’know, “be”.

If you know you’ll only have two characters, though, they should be using that space to emote or - as Awakening did like many other games - show some other details going on behind the portraits.

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This was written like rambling. If you need help then it’s best to just lay out your central points and questions in list format.

In any case, it honestly sounds like you should just move to Ren’Py LOL. There are free use plugin type thingies online for making SRPGs in the engine and you could ask rainlash if you could just port some LT functionality over.

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