Crashlands resolution/design choice

[LPForever18]

Hey I'm making a game on Android/IOS with GameMaker and just wondered what your guys room sizes were? What resolution did you use for android/IOS? Also I'm having a problem with most of my sprites looking blurry because most of the sizes are around 100x100 to 200x200 pixels did you guys use bitmaps or vectors? Just trying to figure out how to make it look nice, but keep memory down and run smoothly. Your guys game looks so good on such a small screen with a lot of detail and runs amazing with animation and it being only around 60 MB it blows my mind. You guys are awesome. Thanks

[bscotchseth]

YOOO! Room size isn't relevant; what matters is the view size. What's your view port & view width/height?

[LPForever18]

I don't have views basically it's a single room and then I have a few different rooms. So my room size is 1024x768 which is also my view size since it is a single fixed room.

[AlanFalcon]

Then your sprites should depend on how large the image should appear on screen. If a character takes up half the screen, he'd need to be 512x768 in order to not appear blurry. Also I'd be insanely curious what kind of game you're making where a character takes up half the screen - Shadow of the Colossus?

[LPForever18]

Nothing is that big most things are 100x100 pixels with 200x200 being the biggest that's why I'm having the problem of it turning out blurry because it is so small. How big is your guys view size?

[bscotchseth]

If your room is 1024x768 and you aren't using views, then you will only get pixel-perfect rendering if the game's window is also 1024x768, which is actually a very rare resolution these days.

For us, we don't use a fixed view size generally. What we do is use display_get_width() and display_get_height to get the aspect ratio of the device. Then, we will fix one dimension of the game (width or height, depending on the game), and resize the other dimension to match the aspect ratio.

Example:

In Flop Rocket, we want everyone to see the same distance in front of their rocket. So we fix the game at 1024 width. The game is designed to be playable on the most narrow aspect ratio generally found on mobile, which is 16:9. So we build the game world to still look good at 1024x576 (16:9). But what if the device is an iPad pro? That has a resolution of 2732 x 2048. NO PROBLEM!

We first get the aspect ratio, which is 4:3. We keep the view width at 1024, because that's our fixed width. Then we set the height of the view to 768, matching the device's aspect ratio. This reveals more artwork outside the top and bottom of the cave in Flop Rocket, but otherwise leaves the gameplay unchanged.

On an iPad, the game will scale up to fill the whole screen. And since an iPad Pro actually has super-high DPI, the game still looks good.

I think if you tried the same approach with your room sizes, you could get the same effect. We never change room sizes, and in fact, we use rooms to just put a single object into, and that object uses code to generate everything and do its stuff.

[LPForever18]

Thanks so much I will definitely do that that helps a ton. One last thing did you guys use bitmaps or vectors for your sprites?

[bscotchsam]

They're made using a vector program (Inkscape), but exported as .png's. So BITMAPS!

[michael84]

I have a question around exporting from Inkscape. Do you typically export at the image size you'll need in game (e.g., 32x32 pixels, etc); or do you export them at a much larger image size and then scale the bitmap down in another program before using it in GameMaker?

I'm having trouble with my bitmaps displaying very pixelated in game when I scale it down to the size I need for my game. Was just curious if I'm doing something wrong on the export here.

btw, I found the video of Sam's STL Game Dev Meetup talk extremely helpful for understanding the basics of Inkscape.

Thanks for your time!

[tofos]

It depends on what resolution of the room do you have. If it's something like 640x480 then 32x32 should be fine. But with bigger resolutions, if you don't want to pixelate sprite, you have to make it bigger. But I think you can make it in GM's sprite editor.