I decided to rethink and revisit character and tile map pixel sizing today. I took a look at this video for some insight.

Octopath

I also did some googling around to see what Square does on some of their titles. I couldn’t find an exact size for Octopath but I found a reference image and attempted to measure in Aseprite using the rectangular marquee tool. I measure that the images are approximately 18x32px. Leaving the characters slightly taller than they are wide. This makes sense proportionally.

Image sourced from seekpng, copied here to avoid hot linking and for reliability purposes.

FF6

This Edgar Sprite (FF6) measures 16x24 but supposedly the environment tiles are 16x16.

Here’s another excerpt from the same website that goes on to talk about FF4 a bit:

These sprites are 16x24, unlike the map sprites which are 16x16…Because of this, they’re much more detailed. from So You Want to Be a Pixel Artist?

Which also had me wondering if I could get away with using a 32x32 character sprite (or ultimately 16x32 or 18x32 or some such) with a 16x16 tileset background.

On paper in Unity this shouldn’t introduce any development complexity due to Unity’s ability to scale images to Unity’s own units properly using its pixels-per-unit attribute:

What I think this will come down to is how much effort I’m willing to put in to the tile sets and how much time it will take me to complete. My skill also becomes an issue here. It seems like 16x16 might be the way to go since it will be easier to learn by having less details to flesh out. We can always redesign the same tile sets later on in 32x32 giving them more detail with an analogous set and scale accordingly (or so I believe). This is probably also worth making a POC for, so I’ll add it to my kanban.