Do developers generally create their game art at a much larger scale then compress it to fit iPhone/iPod touch?
Unity can compress textures if your using that tool. Sometimes compression makes the texture look bad, but its also a smaller build size and less of a memory footprint (faster load times). With the 3GS and iPhone 4 or 3rd gen touch. you probably don't need to compress your textures as much like one would for a iphone 3g or 2nd gen ipod touch The devices has soo much memory on it and too much in memory can spew a warning and even crash the program. - Matt
While using Photoshop I have always used the save for web and mobile devices and that has always saved space for us on most projects. I always compare to the original but usually has looked good.
Did you mean "resize" instead of compress? In that case, it depends on the game. If you're doing a retro, pixel-art game, you most probably work at 1:1. But, if you want to be able to scale your graphics, it's generally a good idea to work at a higher resolution and then shrink the image to the size you want it.
Resize is what I was thinking. Was wondering how much effort it would take to make an app universal. Not much if you already have larger images. (iPhone to iphone4 to iPad) Thanks.
You can't just export a jpeg and use that in your app, surely? I thought there was some reason you shouldn't use jpegs in a game. Performance concerns or something?
We do that with our games We produce everything in 1024x1024 and we resize it in 512x512 for the iphone. Beware of the badseed is an universal app and it load hd texture on the ipad so what you ask is possible. the only problem may be the size of the app. brotherhood of violence is 400Mo in universal app version 300mo for the ipad HD datas 100mo for the iphone datas So this one will probably not be universal app at the end.
There's a big differece between working at a bigger size and making a HD version of the same sprite. When you work on a higher res but you know you're going to shrink the image, you don't bother adding extra detail that won't be visible when you resize. So, if you just use that bigger sprites for your iPad version, they'll probably look unfinished. Take a look at this example from Across Age: You can clearly see that the lower res version is not just shrunk from the higher res one.
pngs are optimised by xcode as part of the build process, in terms of stripping out extra exif data made by photoshop etc We tend to work in hires where possible, however for pixel art, for things like icons you really have to work at 1:1
Using that feature you have the option of format and I always use .png. I have seen people use jpegs in games specifically to lower file sizes even more, but as much as I can remember these were never for any in game asset.
Thank you all for your feedback. My concern here is that I own a lot of games. Some were updated to HD. Some have a separate release. I'd love all my current iPhone/iPod games to run full screen. Guess my best bet is to get the new HD releases and not wait for updates on the big ones. Since it does take more work.
