Title Screen Pixel Art Scaling

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elmrealm

Guest
I'm at the end of my rope, I've been working on a project for about half a year now and I've been jumping through hoops with fixing the display for the pixel art of my game.
This is my second attempt at making a game, the first being very basic.

I've used Pixelated Pope's tutorials and method to set my view for the gameplay section itself, and it works pretty darn well. Its what I have been looking for when it comes to the game. My problem mainly stems from every other part of the game, my custom splash screen, the title screen, the short story introduction; all of which I cannot get to look good (without the half scaling pixels here and there) when trying to use a view and camera to properly keep the aspect ratio of the screen.

At this moment, I'd settle for black bars when in full screen, but I don't even know how to make that happen now that I'm so far into using the cameras and views.
Its genuinely frustrating, as I've done tons of trial an error, along with searching for some answer on the forums and going over youtube videos. I can't seem to find anything that is directed towards the visuals of a title screen and the like done in pixel art.

my image for the BG is 512 X 288
and I understand that I may need to set the image to 480 X 288 to fit with the aspect ratio of a standard screen, I have done this and it did help, but not nearly enough. I would like my pixel art to be able to take up more that 1/4 the screen, as it only looks good when windowed/ and the project I am doing requires the image to be full screen.

As I write this the only thought I have that could help, would be to try and put the title screen, and the story screen on the GUI layer, but I really don't know how well that would work.

If you have any advice, or knowledge on what to do, I would greatly appreciate it.

And sorry for the wall of text its like 5am and I'm losin it.
 

LunaticEdit

Member
I'm working on a pixel game and have 0 issues with the display. Can you post some screenshots or give more details on the issues you're having? As far as 'black bars' go, by default GMS2 will keep aspect ratio on full screen, and that also works out of the box.
 
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elmrealm

Guest
I'm working on a pixel game and have 0 issues with the display. Can you post some screenshots or give more details on the issues you're having? As far as 'black bars' go, by default GMS2 will keep aspect ratio on full screen, and that also works out of the box.
I had started a new file and checked out the use of the default settings, and it helped me understand what my problem was, thanks you.

I think I understand my problem, I had been setting my camera to work with a screen display that was 1920 x 1080, as that is what the game is made to run on. However the laptop I'm working on has a display of 1366 X 768. When switching between the two I was getting it to look good on the 1080 screen but only looking good while windowed on my laptop screen.

Show here: first the image while windowed on my laptop screen
then the image set to full screen on my laptop screen.
 

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You should be building your pixel art game for the smallest resolution possible. Building it FOR 1920 x 1080 is going to cause a lot of problems. You should build it small and let GM scale it up for you.
 
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elmrealm

Guest
You should be building your pixel art game for the smallest resolution possible. Building it FOR 1920 x 1080 is going to cause a lot of problems. You should build it small and let GM scale it up for you.
Well.. I certainly feel like a goof. I thought I had been working small, but I've clearly been in a bubble. I'm still fresh into this and I'm picked way too high of graphical size for my images. Seems like I'm going to be re-making a good deal of pixelart for my game. Whoo boy.

Thank you for your input.
 

TrunX

Member
480*270 is a good resolution as it scales perfectly on both FullHD and 4K screens and it comes close to the vertical resolution of 90s 16bit console games.
If you want to cover also 720p and 1440p screens then 640*360 or 320*180 is the way to go.
 

LunaticEdit

Member
Second. I run the game at 480x270, I even set the GUI resolution to 480x270. GMS2 scales perfectly on all platforms I test on (PC, Mac, and Linux). I'm developing it on a 4k iMac so yeah really really tiny window!
 
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elmrealm

Guest
Well now I'm a bit confused at to what I should do. I was under the impression Pixelated_Pope gave me that my artwork was much too big to be working with and that I should work with smaller images and zoom up to them so that it looks okay in full screen.


But you guys are saying if I have my art set to 480 x 270 Then it should work fine with just the built in GMS camera.
I tried that, and it does work for the 1080 x1920 screen, but not for my laptop screen.

I'm very lost
 

NightFrost

Member
No, they're all giving you the same advice, only that PP appears to gotten the impression that you draw your art at 1920 size. The pixel stretch in your laptop fullscreen image, above, comes both from having to stretch to 1366, there also seems to be a different aspect ratio between windowed (960x576) and fullscreen (1366x768) images, meaning the fullscreen one is getting some vertical stretch as well.

EDIT - made a mistaken assumption regarding your measurements, so deleted that part. :eek:
 
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I recommend joining the GM Discord server (link in my sig). We can help you figure out all of your display and camera woes. If you haven't already, I do recommend checking out my series on resolution and aspect ratio management that explains all of this stuff over on my youtube channel.
 
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