Confronting the Elephant... Pixels in the Room

Hey everyone! Today I need to come to terms with the elephant in the room, known as the elephant pixels in my game. Yes, you read that right - my pixels are all different sizes and it's time to face this head-on.

The Art Journey (Or How I Got Here) 🎨

Being someone just starting out in game development, I first tried to make my own art from scratch. This turned out to be WAY more tedious than anticipated. After hours in Photoshop, I ended up with exactly one thing - my crystal plants. They look decent, but making a whole game's worth of art at that pace? I'd still be drawing grass tiles in 2026.

Then I discovered the lovely sites where I could buy sprite packs. A ground tileset here, an enemy pack there, some houses, and soon I had all the sprites I could want after just a few small purchases to support the artists which I do have great admiration for. Problem solved, right?

The Unity Scaling Trap 📏

Here's where my inexperience really shows. As someone who has never tried to make a game before (but had overly high hopes), I set myself to learning C# and Unity and thought it would all be fine. I could use Unity to resize everything as I went along and poof! Everything would look good at the same scale next to each other.

Except... the pixels.

My current sprite situation:

• Player: 64x64 pixels
• Ground and walls: 16x16 pixels
• Houses and enemies: 32x32 pixels
• My personal made sprites (those crystal plants): 96x96 pixels (I think?)

Once everything was manually scaled in Unity to look the same size as everything else, it was pretty clear how bad the pixel discrepancies were. Some pixels appear huge, others tiny. It looks like I threw different resolution games in a blender. The visual consistency is just... not there.

Show Image

Time to Fix It 🔧

So here's my plan to edit them all to be 32x32. This size was chosen since about 70% of the sprites I have are already 32x32, and I felt like it would be easier to choose a middle ground size. Hopefully, this won't be too hard of a solution to work into something reasonable.

Enter Aseprite 🖌️

I'll now be using Aseprite for this conversion work. I've found that Photoshop was too complicated for pixel art in my personal opinion - it's great for many things, but for pixel-perfect editing? Not so much. I was able to find many quick tutorials for Aseprite that actually made sense to me.

I'd already call myself an artist (though I am completely new to pixel art), so I'm hoping the skills transfer somewhat. The plan is:

For 16x16 sprites (ground/walls):

• Scale up 2x with nearest neighbor
• Add detail to make them look native 32x32
• Break up those blocky patterns

For 64x64 sprites (player):