Is my game resolution too low? - and how to fix?

DigiChain

Member
Hi, I’m in the process of building my first ever PC / Steam game but think I may have made a bit of a rookie mistake with the game resolution. (I’ve only made mobile games previously).

I’ve made my game at 720p (1280 x 720) resolution. From peoples experience is this resolution too low for a Steam game - do Steam customers expect full 1080p? - and are they likely to view the game negatively because of this?

If so what is the best way to go about upscaling my game?

It’s worth noting that my game is an adventure game with full res imagery (not pixel-style). I can quite easily re-render my images at a higher resolution, but the game has been built using 1280x720 room sizes - so do I need to rebuild all the rooms at a higher size - or are there any neat tricks I can use to avoid this?
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
As long as the game window adapts to the screen size, then the resolution is not an issue. I mean, if you are using hi-res graphics, then you could go for the full 1080p, but 720p is fine, IMHO... for pixel art, then it's pretty much irrelevant. My game Skein uses a resolution of 490x270 and I have a current WIP that the is at 90x45!!!! Just make sure the game scale well when in fullscreen and you should be fine... So, for a game like the one you are making, I'd say 720p is more than adequate for windowed mode, and just ensure it adapts well to fullscreen and everything will be okay.
 

DigiChain

Member
Thanks for your thoughts Nocturne!
Having just done some experimenting with different screen sizes etc I've concluded that the bulk of my game looks perfectly fine when scaled up, but other parts do definitely need to be in full HD - therefore I'll focus on just rebuilding the bits that I feel need the extra resolution!
 

Khao

Member
I worked on a 720p game a couple of years ago. By the end of development pretty much everyone regretted the decision of making it 720p, but it turns out changing it to 1080p was fairly trivial. Yes, all assets were still meant for a 720p screen, but the game was full of scaled and rotated sprites, as well as tiny particle effects, which made the switch to 1080p be surprisingly effective even without changing all sprites to match. Text especially got the biggest improvement. Other minor things like character and camera movement became instantly smoother when having more pixels to work with. Seriously, even if your assets are just 720, you can benefit a lot from 1080.

Just mess around with view ports in the first room of your game and you'll get a different resolution. It's that simple. If you feel like it's not enough of an improvement, you can use higher-res sprites for your characters and scale them down using image_xscale and image_yscale. On bigger resolutions they'll take full advantage of the extra pixels despite being scaled to a smaller size. Either way, you might be surprised at how well your game might hold up at larger resolutions.

The game I'm making right now is "meant" for 1080p screens, but character sprites are scaled to half-size in the screen just to have a successful 4K support. These kind of things are seriously worth it in my opinion.
 

DigiChain

Member
Thanks Khao, this is exactly what I have ended up doing - changing the resolution of the game and then replacing certain sprites with high-res versions using the image_xscale / yscale to scale down.
My game is actually kind of a game within a game, and only a small proportion of it actually needs to be a higher resolution so not as much work as I first feared.

Anyway - it's a lesson learnt for future projects!
 
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