Hello! Usually, I am in "How to...?", but today I just want to talk with other developers and see the feedback, albeit incredibly approximate due to not knowing exactly how the game works. But I am going to explain shortly!
In this top-down game, you control a sort of space vacuum cleaner that has to collect pink dust from a series of rooms. You can freely control your so-called Roomba with the 4 directions.
As you can see in this screenshot, you have more or less a good view of the room you're in. Plus, this Roomba is, at its max speed, so satisfying to drive, yet a bit too fast.
After having fun driving around in this room, I admit that I have two issues:
- I think the screen size since it's somewhat big, kind of "spoils" the size of the room and the objects placed. I want a veil of mystery coming from how it looks.
- Because of the spoiler of the room size, I feel like it makes the other objects not as big as they should be. and it's also probably due to the Roomba's speed.
On a side note, I have considered that many pixel games such as Part-Time UFO or Celeste have a small screen size (in-game). The screen size in the game I am making is currently 960 x 540. I think this might be the problem: Maybe I have to resize the screen, make it small a little.
The blue room I made and I showed you in these screenshots is meant to be medium size.
So I tried making experiments, just for the sake of trying, with the premise that I changed only the assets that were worth to try changing for this experiment.
The first thing I tried was to decrease the size from 960x540 to 480x270.
Now the game feels claustrophobic, and I don't like it. The Roomba is the sole protagonist, and its speed is now so fast that may make someone feel nauseous.
So I had the idea of making the Roomba smaller. I also decreased the speed by half.
I think that I am up to something. Of course, I didn't fit all the assets for this test, this is why the HUD is still too big for 480x270. And the Roomba is a bit too small. But overall, I see the approximate result, the experiment in this, and think that it may be a solution.
But I want to hear your opinions because I think having a big screen size has its own benefits. Maybe 480x270 is too small? 640x360 could be a thing? Maybe this idea doesn't work well for a top-down game? I don't know, I am ok to hear opinions on this matter. Please let me know in the comments below.
PS: I have some videos on Twitter but I don't know if it's classified as self-commercial - that won't be my intention, I have nothing to commercialize for a product that doesn't exist in the market yet.
Thanks for reading!