(SOLVED) How do I down scale text in pixel art game?

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  • Hello!

    I am struggling to find a good way of fitting longer pieces of text on the screen with small resolution pixel art games. I have tried Sprite Fonts but can`t fit even those in the room I am working with. I have also tried moving texts on their own layer and scaling the layer down but that distorts the text.

    Best way I can think of would be to run game in full screen mode but keep the original unscaled text layer. This I think would be quite beneficial since you could work on sub-pixel detail compared to your actual game scale. However I haven`t found a way to achieve this. Workaround obviously being to scale your actual game assets bigger or to upscale your gameplay layers, but this will cause other annoying issues...

    Anyone have any ideas?

    SOLUTION:

    - Best solution i have come up with is to upscale actual game layers and leave text layer at 1x. This way you can multiply the amount of pixels you work with in your text. Upscaling game layers was surprisingly easy and did not affect performance.

  • What resolution are you working in? And how long is the text you want to display?

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  • Hi brushfe!

    Its more of a general problem I have run into with pixel art games. Right now I would like to make a small top down demo game with preferably using only 8x8 tiles on it. Screen resolution would probably be 240x135. I am also planning to implement dialogue system and that`s where the problem lies...

  • Right, yeah it's an unfortunate reality that letters need a minimum amount of pixels to be legible!

    There's some tiny pixel typefaces out there, which can do wonders with three/four-pixel-high letters, but that might a bit much with full dialogue.

    I've found it beneficial to base the resolution on the finest detail in the design document. If dialogue needs to be there, find the smallest pixel typeface you like, then build the ui and graphics out from there.

    It sounds like you'll have to go to 480*270 with 2x scale graphics to make it feel like 8*8, but still have your type legible. You mentioned this might cause some annoying issues, but you'll have to weigh those and decide.

    All said there may be a technical approach in construct with layers, using layer scale, canvas, etc. But that's beyond my capabilities, so hopefully the much more qualified users here can tell you that! :)

  • Yeah, thanks. Seems like we have come to the same conclusion. Best and easiest solution I have found is to either manually scale the assets bigger or to scale the entire game layers bigger. I wish there would be a way to disable full screen scaling for certain layers, I think that would do the trick.

    Once again thank you for your input. Hopefully some one can come up with more delicate solution.

  • Sure thing! Maybe your last idea could be accomplished by altering layer scale - check out the manual entry for more on that!

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