I found this at Tiny Cartridge. Pretty much a long interview with Jeff Luke, who is the responsible art director for Scribblenauts, Lock’s Quest and Drawn to Life for the Nintendo DS.

The interview is divided into two parts (Part 1 / Part 2) and really leave no questions open – if you ever had questions about drawing, making and handling graphics for mobile or console development. Jeff Luke is the man, who does game design and art management at 5th Cell.

Scene from Scribblenauts

I highly suggest to read all of this interview. Some – maybe surprising quotes – should give you some extra-motivation to go through all of it. Jeff says on developing graphics for the DS:

“Well, one of the biggest things to keep in mind is the different brightness settings. You need to make sure your game looks good on all brightness levels which can sometimes be quite a hassle, but in the end, it’s the attention to detail that can make or break the experience for gamers. In conjunction with the resolution, screen real estate is a really big issue. You need to always be aware of exactly how much space you have on that screen at all times. Make a GUI sprite too big and you just end up having to redo it.”

“(…) we just make sure we create the original assets in high res and then scale down from there for in game art if needed. All of the portraits in Lock’s Quest started out as massive, multi-thousand pixel, full-body images of the characters that we then scaled down and took just the upper body portion of for the portraits.”

Scene from Drawn to Life