Welcome to the community
@goku shackson.
I’ve always wondered: where do the level backgrounds come from, and how are they created? Do you need pixel art skills to get the scaling right?
That depends on whether you mean drawing original backgrounds or assembling something from existing artwork. Backgrounds can be drawn from scratch, built from reusable tiles and objects, extracted from other games, or made through some combination of those approaches.
Creating original artwork is a bit like asking
"how do I draw well?" There isn't a tool setting or a handful of forum pointers that replaces learning perspective, proportions, lighting, and composition. Those are skills you develop through study and practice, including when you're working in pixels.
Generative AI tools are another option you'll inevitably encounter. They can help you explore compositions, rough out a scene, and provide a starting point to build on. The caution is that their output can look sterile or generic, and something that resembles pixel art isn't necessarily usable pixel artwork. Perspective, lighting, and pixel consistency still need checking and often require a high degree of manual correction. You can use these tools to experiment with those concepts while learning, but don't assume their output demonstrates them correctly just because it looks convincing.
Getting the scale right is a more specific problem, though, and you can start with something practical: put one of your character sprites into the scene as a reference. Check it against doors, cars, railings, and other recognizable objects. Work at your project's intended resolution so you're judging how everything actually fits together.
One of our more prolific creators here,
@O Ilusionista, is a professional graphic artist and can give you much better places to start than I can.
If anyone knows of a tool or a tutorial on how to create backgrounds—or how to convert fighting game stages into beat-'em-up stages—I’d love to know.
For the Neo-Geo KOF games, extracting the existing artwork is quite simple due to quirks of the hardware.
- The Neo-Geo builds its scrolling scenery from sprites, with a budget of 381 total and 96 per scan-line. Most Neo-Geo games, KOF series included, could only afford a couple of layers, so there's usually not a huge volume to rip.
- The Neo-Geo supports fixed four-frame or eight-frame sprite animation loops that run without CPU intervention. This feature is almost irresistible to creators when adding background dressing, so most Neo-Geo backgrounds have fairly predictable animation patterns.
- Emulator graphics viewers can help you isolate and extract those pieces. WinKawaks - though very long dead - is an old favorite of mine for that.
Turning the result into a beat-'em-up stage is where the art work comes back in. Fighting-game scenery only needs to support characters standing along its fighting line. Your characters need room to move up and down the floor, so the original ground may need extending or redrawing to make that movement look convincing. Simply stretching the image won't fix its perspective.
Start with a stage that already has a broad, fairly flat floor. Keep the original artwork at its native pixel size for your first attempt, place your character in it, and check how the scene looks at both the nearest and farthest walking positions. That will show you what needs changing much more clearly than trying to redesign the whole background at once.
HTH,
DC
