4.4.1
I have a quick question. How do you decide on the Sprite and tile size for your game. I am making a Tower Defense game and I wanted to start focusing on the look of the game and I am stumped about choosing the size. The game that I am making is in 1080p for the base resolution. So do you decide on that without anything else like okay I am going with 16x16 with this or I need to take something into consideration to make calculations like using 64x64
It partly depends on how big you want things to be, really. On older hardware (that is, back in the day of 16 bit machines and earlier) tile sizes were fixed in hardware, because they were designed around text display. A lot of machines in the 8 bit days had 8x8 tiles, for example. Sprite sizes were often fixed too, though not always the same size as the tiles.
Modern tilemaps and sprites are emulating that hardware, but with vastly more flexibility.
For a game where you’re planning on using the tilemap as it would have been used in days of yore (your tower defense game, for example), a lot of the decision about size will come down to how big you want things like paths to be on the screen. If you want to do small, detailed paths using simple tiles, you’ll need smaller tiles. If you want to make big, chunky paths using simple tiles, you can get away with bigger tiles.
You don’t need to use a tilemap at all if you don’t want to; you could use an image for your terrain layer, and sprites for building placement.
Probably the main consideration for you is, how big is a “level”? Do you want to have a fairly complex map that’s all visible at once? A small, simple map that’s zoomed way in? A moderately complex map that’s too big to fit on screen all at once, so the player scrolls around?
For me it’s two thing you need to consider.
first one the visual of your game. Small size are often use for pixel art game. For exemple super Mario world use 16x16 tiles. If you want more details, you need bigger tile size.
Second, it depends on how configurable you need your terrain to be. If you just care to have information for a single tile just choose from the first point but if you need more control on specific par of your maps you can need to have a subdivision of your tile map but this have a lots of counter parts.
you cannot use auto tile easely and you will need much more care to avoid error on mapping and time to create huge space.
you can find game made with different tile map size on Internet. For exemple rpg maker vx use a 32x32 tiles size as rpg maker mv use 48x48 tile size. But you can go even bigger. In 3d for wall texturing you can use 512x512 tile.