Do you experts think scanning hand-drawn art and digitally painting it would be a better idea than drawing lines in GIMP by mouse (I have no drawing tablet)? I recall there was a thread on these forums about an online(?) graphics ditherer for some display mode some years ago, which made me consider this option.
Background for my case:
I'll have to start working on the location graphics for my next adventure game at some point, and I'm finally free of gfx memory usage constraints in game chapters. Well, I can use as many unique tiles for all locations as I like now, so I don't have to plan and manually edit the pictures to preserve space (if ROM size is unlimited).
I have a flatbed scanner and I consider myself amateur-level with hand-drawn art, although I haven't done it in years. My current pipeline has been drawing the location graphics in GIMP, exporting them to PNG and converting these by a Python script.
The location graphics are 14*14 characters, so 112*112 pixels. My main concerns are that this is not a very big picture to use dithering on, colour bleeding will kick in more notably plus the rest of the UI will still be "cartoony" like before. The tool I faintly recall may also have been not for screen 2 (I'm sticking by that constraint).
Of course, I will still need to draw a title picture, where the image is 256x192, which is a second case. And possibly static cutscenes of cartoon panels if I ever get around to adding them... tbh, not very likely right now. (Think of the ones in Phantasy Star 4 on Megadrive or The Caped Crusader gameplay.)
