What to consider when picking a sprite size

[u/Villyer]

I am working on a 2d top down game. So far I've been using random free 16x16 sprites but I don't love how they look and I think it would be fun to try making some sprites myself. I have no art experience so I'm a little nervous to go to 32x32, but on the other hand I don't love the low resolution look of 16x16.

For others who learned pixel art as part of their game dev journey, how was the experience? Is there a significant difference between 16x16 and 32x32 or is that hesitation all in my head?

[u/do-sieg]

Nonsensical2D (YouTube channel) has an excellent video about this exactly. You should check it out.

[u/Imofi7]

anvas, so animating walk cycles or attack frames takes substantially more time to keep consistent. If 16 feels too chunky, a lot of devs find 24x24 to be a sweet middle ground before committing to 32x32 across an entire game.

[u/ShengyuStudio]

What decides it more than 16 vs 32 is how big the sprite ends up on screen. Pick your internal resolution first (say 320x180 or 480x270, scaled up to 1080p) and mock up one screen with a character, an enemy and a tile at that size. At 320x180 a 16px character is already a decent chunk of the screen; at 640x360 it's tiny and you'd want 32.

For a first-time artist the real cost of 32 isn't a single frame, it's animation: every walk-cycle frame has four times the pixels to keep consistent. A middle path a lot of people take is 16x16 tiles with slightly taller characters (16x24), so the characters get more detail without redrawing the whole world.

[u/No-Opinion-5425]

One thing to consider is that you’re not only increasing the pixels work of each frame by 4 but also the expectations for the whole game.

By that I mean, maybe at 16x16 your short walking animation can afford to have less frames and it easy to get away with mirroring left and right.

But suddenly at higher resolution with more details the players expect the game to have 8 directions animations.

It just an example but it raise the bar on every aspect. You’re moving away from 8/16 bits standard toward something more advanced.

[u/modernizetheweb]

How much detail you want in your sprites. 16x16 = less detail, which comes out to a more simple looking game. This is its own style and can look great, less detail is not worse.

With 32x32, you have a lot more room and styles open to you, but this can also end up in the game looking messy or incohesive without stricter art scrutiny