First steps into videogame creation

[Switchstance]

Since some weeks I've starting to create a videogame. My basic idea was a platform-action-puzzle game, like Snow Bros, Tumbletop, Bubble Bobble, that type of game. You need to clear rooms with enemies, defeat a boss, etc.

For 2 weeks I am into game-design thing, u know, writting all the things I want to show, characters, areas, power-ups, enemies, bosses, a story-line for the game, etc.

Ok, the thing is, I can actually work into the game-programming without any issue, but I really want to make a videogame with old-school sprite look-like, like the real famicom style. For that I need to figure out how many colours I can use and how many pixels I can use for screen. U know, techy stuff.

I've seen in some pages, when miyamoto design Mario he used a grid-cardboard and he start to draw Mario there, and actually Mario end looking more smaller than the first designs, well, I used a similar technique, but I did not get any good result.

The screen of each lvl is 320 x 240, I think that's the normal resolution of the old famicom, so I am working with that, and blocks of 32 x 32 pixels for the elements of the game, powerups, platforms, etc.

I think the character should be the double of the 32x32 pixels so it doesn't look like a midget, so guys, any of you have any experience making videogame-sprites? to give me some help here.

Much help appreciated.

[133MHz]

The Famicom's video resolution is 256x224, with 8x8 tiles.
Mario consists of 6 tiles arranged in 2x3 horiz.x vert. tiles, making him 24 pixels tall and 16 pixels wide.

Use a small tile size like 8x8 as the building blocks of your environment, that way you can keep every element proportional to each other. Too big a tile size and you won't be able to make small objects behave properly.

320x240 is a good resolution to work with, since it's half of VGA and it's exactly 4:3. You can fit 1200 NES tiles on such a screen (the original Famicom res. manages to get 960 tiles).

16 colors per tile will get you some nice SNES-like graphics.

Just out of curiosity, what programming language & environment will you be using?

[Switchstance]

I am using Game-maker and GML since a long time, it's really great to create arcade/retrogames engines really fast. The thing is I never work making my own graphics, so I am kinda newbie with that.

In the past to make my games I used Flash, but for a project like this, I want to see push GameMaker to see what I can get.