Game Resolution Question

Hi all,

I was wondering what youre opinion is in what minimal resolution to setup a game this day's for a platformer.

Is it okay to set minimal resolution and design for 1024x786 or has it be still 800x600 or pretty bad 640x480?

And how to make the people happy that have HD screens?

Its really a pain in the arse, all the options to make.

My opinion is that a platformer has the best look in a HD screen, if its real HD or a 1024x786 with blak bars at top and bottom, it looks way better I think.

But back to the question, what shall be the minimal resolution for a platformer in 2011?

Thanks in advance for every reply.

Have a look at the primary screen resolution in the steam hardware survey, to get an idea at least.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

The good thing about Construct is that you can change the display resolution during runtime, I'm designing my game to work with any screen resolution (will look best on 2560 x 1600 resolution screen, and still look reasonable at 800 x 600).

Thanks Alspal, this is realy usefull to know

I like to design my game in 1920x1080 but then its a pain to run it for 800x600 amd 1024x786, so dont know still what to do with it.

There's no "minimal resolution". My game's resolution is 240x160, and then it's scaled up to fit any screen. Just because people have big hd screens, doesn't mean you have to fill them by making your game at that resolution. A bigger window also means more, and bigger art, and more vram usage. In my opinion, don't design for HD only. It will only make lots of people unable to play. 1024x786 is plenty big for a platformer. Even at that size you'll have trouble filling it with decent art.

I can definitely appreciate davio's point of view, and alot of the retro games people make, in construct and elsewhere, look awesome, and some even sell next to the big boys(http://store.steampowered.com/app/70300/?snr=1_4_4__13). But I want to present the opposing view. I love HD visuals. It's why alot of people buy good graphics cards. If you have a million years to work on your game, ideally, you would have it be able to switch resolutions, with up to that 1980x1080 most common resolution from the Steam hardware survey. I'd say 1024x768 is a reasonable minimum, if you're wanting almost anyone to be able to play your game, but if you have the time, and the art ability, there's a major shortage of games that take advantage of high resolutions. Just be careful with the VRAM, without bones or some other clever distortion, it's difficult to maintain that size, and have decent animation at the same time, not just with construct, but any 2d engine

if you're going to create hd sized textures though. I think anyone with a pc that had to run at 800x600 or 1024x768 wouldn't be able to run it, unless you had lower res versions of the textures as well

[quote:27o93jp2]There's no "minimal resolution". My game's resolution is 240x160, and then it's scaled up to fit any screen

To Davioware: Thanks for the reply, In youre game it works verry good but I dont want to scale up to fit the screen because my art is not in retro style.

My game art looks more like a 2.5D rpg. The backgrounds are build up out of 40 layers to create depth of field, plus that I dont use tiles to make my levels.

Only thing how it wil work is if I can do the opposite, but my programming skills are to low.

What I really want is to get the system info from the user so I can set automatic the right resolution and change the zoom level.

That way it can look at every screen resolution good.

[quote:27o93jp2] I'd say 1024x768 is a reasonable minimum, if you're wanting almost anyone to be able to play your game, but if you have the time, and the art ability, there's a major shortage of games that take advantage of high resolutions. Just be careful with the VRAM, without bones or some other clever distortion, it's difficult to maintain that size, and have decent animation at the same time, not just with construct, but any 2d engine

To Lucid: Thanks for the reply, the game use only around 40mb of Vram now and only 10mb is used for the backgrounds at the moment but it shall be around 20mb later one for backgrounds and think around 50mb for animations so that is then around 70mb of Vram, thats not a problem I think for most systems.

Don't get me wrong, I like HD visuals also. I have a great pc that can play any new game at 1080p. I'm just saying that making your game "HD only" is a bad idea.

Also, Making a HD game without abstract graphics, if you're a one man team, is very, very hard. And finally, just because it's HD, it doesn't mean it will look good.

[quote:3qjapq33] Also, Making a HD game without abstract graphics, if you're a one man team, is very, very hard. And finally, just because it's HD, it doesn't mean it will look good.

Hi Davio, i'm aware of that to, what I have now looks verry good but it cost me a lot of time to create as well, but its worth to me, I want to have good looking graphics in my game, its just the way I like to play games and as many people. My animations are all 3d graphics and the other graphics I made with Artrage.

I don't know how I managed it every time but most of the graphics to build my levels are just a few graphics but with transparancy, scaling etc. you can do a lot and I made only things that are really necessary. Most of the game is just nature, forest, rocky etc.

Yep, for me, my current scrolling platformer is 640x480 scaled up to whatever is needed to keep the pixel look of the graphics, but if I wasn't going for the pixel look, I'd probably go for 1024x768 as my maximun resolution before stretching.

I know it's tempting to try and go for the "HD" resolutions, but personally I've never bought a game because it was HD, and prefer my games to have gameplay.

Krush.

But back to the question, what shall be the minimal resolution for a platformer in 2011?

96x80

Pics or it didn't happen