platformer questions

I am working on my second game. I am trying to make a stick figure / hand drawn army game.

A couple questions:

I don't plan on having many areas that the player can fall off the map, but I still want them to be able to jump from buildings and have gravity. Is a platformer still the best idea for this?

From the example it says to use 4048 x 2000 for a background. If you can, is it better to use smaller and have them repeat? If you want the background to just repeat and play on a mobile phone or tablet, would 2k by 2k save much space?

I was going to use a auto runner as a template, but I want the player to be able to go back, and not always move.

Check out my first hand drawn and scanned tank. I have not colorized the wheels yet.

I will scale this tank down more, this is just start. What do you think?

Thanks!

"Is a platformer still the best idea for this?"

Yes. A thousand times yes! Side-view platformer is hands down the best perspective for indies due to the ease of art asset creation.

Top view is also easy, but for having anything like jumping it becomes much more difficult for the player to resolve what's going on, since heights in that perspective are tricky to convey.

"If you want the background to just repeat and play on a mobile phone or tablet, would 2k by 2k save much space?"

If you're worried about space, use tiles. Don't use a huge background image.

"Check out my first hand drawn and scanned tank. I have not colorized the wheels yet.

I will scale this tank down more, this is just start. What do you think?"

It looks good so far! The wheels are the trickiest part, though. Make sure you use some photo references to get the details and colors right.

From the example it says to use 4048 x 2000 for a background. If you can, is it better to use smaller and have them repeat? If you want the background to just repeat and play on a mobile phone or tablet, would 2k by 2k save much space?

using this large of a background for mobile is not a good idea. It would be much better to have them smaller and then have them repeat. Due to how images scale up for mobile phones, Even 2k by 2k would round up to 2048x2048, which many phones can't even hold that amount of resolution in their RAM. i would try to keep everything within or under 1024x1024, I've had soooo many problems with anything larger than that. Mobile devices only render images at a power of 2, so everything rounds up, for example: if you have an image that is 1024x64, phones will store it in memory as an even power of 2, so they would store your image at 1024x1024.

(Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this next one, but this is what I've been told on numerous occasions ) If you have an image that's 1026x1024, it will round up to the nearest power of 2, which would be stored at 2048x2048 in your phones memory, therefore taking up an incredible amount of space. So if you're developing for mobile, be very careful with your native image sizes. (native being the actual raw image, and not what is edited/scaled/resized within the game layout)

Thanks bscarl88, that is a interesting point. I will have to read up more on this problem. If anyone has some insight on it please provide.

Thanks

Rule of thumb for mobile is ALWAYS use as little as possible to CONVEY as much as possible. The more that a mobile has to keep track of - be it in numbers and/or size of each art asset - the more likely it is to crash. Even today's more powerful phones are still greatly limited copmared to our laptops and PCs. Treat them like babies and don't load them over with more than the can handle.

You also referenced a picture but I'm not seeing anything. Do you have a link you can share?