2d game background and level art

It depends.
And what do you mean exactly with hand drawn? Do you mean hand drawn in a software like Photoshop? Or drawn on paper and scanned?

A game like Warcraft 2: Tides of darkness. The sprites are drawn with a software(like we have Photoshop now) and made tileable. Warcraft is 2.5D I know but it can also be done for 2D games. It just depends on how your level need to look like.

Assume I want to make a maze game.
With this maze: http://www.colourbox...llustration.jpg I can't use anything tileable.
With this maze: http://i1-games.soft...-Map-maze_1.jpg I can use everything tileable.

Tiles are mostly drawn with software.(sometimes with support of photographs that will be used as a layer on the hand drawn picture to make it more realistic)
Backgrounds with no tiles are drawn with software also. But Photoshop is not really used for this. More something like Illustrator, to create vectors drawings.

And if you meant drawing, like drawing on paper. No that's not done for games. Unless you want to create a cartoony game maybe.

This all said I'll repeat: it all depends on how your levels needs to look like.


~EngineProgrammer

Thank you!

Specifically for a megaman-ish sidescrolling platformer...

I was thinking hand-drawn as in literal real life hand drawn.

So really the levels and background must be done by a program such as Adobe Illustrator...

Are there any less expensive products that I can use?