That may sound like a lot, but I’ve actually been slacking. Personally, I think this makes the game look nicer and hopefully will make it play fluently.For those of you who have lost count, this is the third time that I’ve reviewed Cave Story, and the second time I’ve reviewed it on the 3DS platform. This means creating a sprite which is 16 pixels in height, rather than the 32 I was expecting to be using. Which leaves me at a point in development where I need to make a choice… So for now, I’m going to concentrate on creating a sprite equal to the height of my (hypothetical) tiles. There is no right or wrong, or good or bad. She does wear a helmet though, so this additional height is another one of those hat things…Īfter reading various forums, the general consensus is that it all dimensions are entirely the choice of the designer. In Super Matroid for SNES, character Samus seems slightly taller than before. In Super Mario Bros 3, the sprite proportions remain pretty much the same as the original. In this case, it’s probably just more likely that Nintendo have tried to show how small Kirby is in comparison to the world!Įven as we move into the world of 16-bit, sprite sizes remain consistent with previous versions of games. This might similarly explain Kirby’s small size in Kirby’s Adventure, as Kirby expands when swallowing an item or enemy. However, this reduced size is probably just a way to leave room for growth when a mushroom is eaten: In Super Mario Bros, Mario starts the game as a half-sized sprite, which is roughly the same shape as the background tiles. One slight exception I found amongst old NES platformers, was the original Super Mario Bros, and similarly Kirby’s Adventure. However when I looked back at old NES platformers like the original Castlevania, Contra, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins and Metroid it seemed that traditionally, character sprites were double the size of the background tiles (actually, in the case of Contra I couldn’t decide what size the tiles actually were, so I could be wrong!)īackground tiles half the height of character sprites: I can imagine that from a gameplay perspective, these proportions work in the favour of the player who must calculate jump and fire distances etc. From an aesthetic point of view, I think it makes everything look neat and tidy, as every aligns nicely to a consistent grid. What confuses me about this selection of new(ish) games, is why they all decided to work to these proportions. In Jonathan Lavigne’s Ninja Senki, the character sprite is not only the same height as the background tiles but is a pretty similar width too!Īnd in Cave Story, the character sprite for main character Quote is the exact same height as the tiles, however the NPC character is slightly taller.

In Fez, Gomez measures the exact same height as the background tiles (with the exception of The Fez which sits on top of this height).Īgain, in The Archer the character sprite and tile height are very similar, except for hats which seem to cause the illusion of height in games! In my head, I think I assumed that character sprites needed the extra detail provided by double height. Most interestingly is that I hadn’t noticed this yet in any of the game I’ve previously written about on this Blog. I’ve been working out some background tile to character sprite ratios, and firstly have found that there are very few recurring ratios, and secondly that there are a lot of games which use character sprites that are exactly the same height as their background tiles. I may have been wrong in a previous post where I stated that character sprites were often double the height of a single tile in 2D games.

Cave story sprites