RESOLUTION guide for game devs & GameMaker

resolution it's something you need to get right early on in your game project because it determines a lot of things about how to make your assets how to plan your available screen space how your game will work across different devices and even things like how movement and subpixels are going to work there is some game maker specific info in this video but generally these Concepts apply broadly across game development firstly if you're making your first game don't be tricked into believing you need to offer a wide array of resolution options just because that's the standard in many AAA PC games it's great quality of life and it is an expectation many players have of games of a certain scope and quality but that likely isn't where your first games are going to be aiming so it's much more important that you choose one target resolution and aspect ratio as early as possible and stick to it even if you do plan to offer other resolution options you want to have a foundation to work from which will hopefully be the most natural resolution to use for your players so what resolution or aspect ratio should you pick the answer is obviously that it depends on your game your art style your target platforms Etc but here are some rules of thumb you can use for Windows games and other common platforms if you're making a pixel art game a really good rule of thumb resolution is 320 by 180 or 640x360 they have an aspect ratio of 16x9 which is very common across monitors TVs and phones these two small resolutions also perfectly scale up to all of the most common 16x9 HD resolutions like 1080p 2K 4K in-hole multiples which means you don't get any weird pixel stretching going on this is especially important for pixel art but helpful across the board you want to scale your game in whole integers like this whenever possible it's worth noting there is a big difference between these two small resolutions in terms of the sheer number of pixels you have in order to show detail more detail is not necessarily better one of the biggest concerns you should have is that it takes exponentially longer to produce pixel art the higher your target detail level so be careful I would advise 320x180 to beginners over 640 by 360 personally for non-pixel art games I would still generally start with a 16x9 resolution I'd probably look at 1280x720 first of all it might seem low but it's honestly quite a nice resolution at least for Windows games in my experience it does have a 1.5 scale to 1080 but a clean 2x scale to 1440 and 3x2 to 160. this might be a fairly dated example but braid and many more modern games like it is still a beautiful game to this day and its native resolution is only 1280x720 unless you have a particular reason or goal that demands it I wouldn't advise going Beyond 1920x1080 as a Target generally for most 2D games at least again for beginners managing your texture Pages performance and our assets gets trickier the bigger your assets get and Screen resolutions above this point are still not as common as you might think at least on desktop machines that said if you are considering supporting higher resolutions for your HD game it does make sense to create large art assets if you can even when targeting lower resolutions initially you can then scale down assets for lower resolutions which tends to work better than scaling up for larger resolutions but please try not to overthink this for your first games I'd say you should simply make your assets with one conservatively chosen resolution in mind while you grow as a developer and gain experience in-game maker specifically everything in your game is by default drawn to something called the application surface you can think of the application surface size as being your game's internal resolution when I talk about your game's resolution I'm usually talking about this by default the application surface simply matches the size of your game window which in turn defaults to the size of your first room or the space used by your viewports if they've been enabled you can set your application surface and therefore the internal resolution of your game manually in game maker by using surface resize with the application surface this sets the resolution of your game to be the same regardless of your Windows size with some special exceptions like the GUI layer and the back buffer but I don't really have time to cover those here you generally want to fix your resolution in this way for a pixel art game as you're likely to want a bigger game window than say 320.180 but you you don't want to scale that internal resolution with it you want the resolution of the game to stay small otherwise you may run into some unwanted subpixels with anything that has a non-integer position or scale also if you need to zoom in or out try to spend most of your time at whole integer zoom level so when I zoom to exhume and so on this is more important for pixel art games generally because anything in between you might notice weirdness where some pixels get stretched however there are some clever tricks you can use with modern pixel art games if you manually take control of your game rendering you can for example create a smooth sub pixel capable camera and solve some of those zooming issues I mentioned while retaining a Pixel Perfect Game resolution check out my other video on smooth pixel art cameras for more about that eventually of course you might need to change resolution perhaps you're targeting a new platform with a different aspect ratio since 16x9 is so common if you use one of the resolutions I mentioned before often you can just scale your game in multiples without much issue but if you do need to change aspect ratio that raises a few questions and different options firstly you can simply scale up your game to fit the window with the aspect ratio in game maker actually does this by default with a per project setting you will have to accept your game having some black bars that appear around the edges but this is generally fine especially for 16x9 games and there are many fun ways to disguise or decorate this space using GUI layer or other drawing tools beyond the application surface and it might just be necessary actually changing the aspect ratio will potentially change a lot about your game because it affects what the player can physically see if there's a camera in your game you might be revealing or obscuring more of your levels and this can be a very big deal for 100 reasons from revealing important details too soon to obscuring important things during cut scenes to potential gameplay advantages with more or less Vision Etc if you usually just show the whole room at once in your game you might have no choice at all as you simply need to fit all of your level contents on the screen and your levels are more of a specific size another perspective is a game I made that has fixed level sizes of a super ancient 4x3 aspect ratio the 102 4x768 the game simply has black bars to compensate but these fit the graphical style of the game and it looks fine however you might want to actually change around aspect ratio and internal resolution perhaps you're making a grand strategy game where you've decided the more pixels you have to show more of the world to the player at once the better and you want to make maximum use of whatever resolution you have on your device while there simply just isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to a change in aspect ratio the closest thing is usually to scale either your width or your height to fit your window first then adjust the other dimension as needed based on your new aspect ratio with some simple math for example let's take a 16x9 640x360 game and scale up to a 16 by 10 display like 1920x1200 normally this would result in just stretching your game window up to fit by tripling its size so it occupied a space of to 1920x1080 leaving 120 pixels worth of black bars at the edge but if we don't want those black bars at the edge we need to know how to apply a 16 by 10 aspect ratio to our internal resolution of 640 by 360. we'll keep the width the same since we know that already fits quite nicely so how much do we need to increase our height by well if we divide 1920 by 1200 or or 16x10 this value shows us how much the width of our Target resolution is bigger than the height that's 1.6 times bigger this is one aspect ratio means for every 16 pixels of width there is 10 pixels of height so if we divide our original width of 640 by 1.6 we get our Target height and if you want to get a Target width you can multiply your original height by this number so our final height should be 640 divided by 1.6 which is 400 pixels so that in game maker for example we can change our application surface and view size to match you can even detect whether you need to scale up your height or your width based on your display size and then apply the appropriate Mass to scale to any resolution this is not always or even often the way to go for most games though like I said there's a lot of game design consequences to changing your game's aspect ratio so make sure you know what you're doing most of the time working with black bars is fine and what's more important is choosing a resolution that scales well and is appropriate for your game and visual style so that's my primer on resolution in games there's a lot of the details for game maker in particular I could cover here but I think understanding this context is important before answering how to change our resolution in game maker for example it's important to first know what we mean when we say resolution and to establish when and why you would want to change it so with that context set what would you like to learn more about leave comments and suggestions below also I would be remiss not to mention pixelated Pope's excellent and venerable three-part series on this topic that I still very much recommend you might expect it to be out of date and while this is partly true of some game maker specific code in part 3 it was made in 2016. the concepts taught in part one and two are exactly the same and you can still get a ton out of it so please do go and watch that series if you haven't already thank you to my patrons for voting for this topic funding this video and all of my other work thank you two of course for watching till the end liking subbing all that good stuff cheers all catch you all next time

Channel: Shaun Spalding

Views: 38,764

Keywords: Game Maker (Video Game Engine), Tutorial, GameMaker Tutorial, GameMaker, Game Development, Indie Games, Tutorial Series, Game Maker Studio, Making Games, How to make games, GameMaker Studio 2, GMS, GMS2, resolution, game resolution, 1080p, 2k, 4k, 640x360, pixel art, dynamic resolution, gamedev, gamedev guide, 320x180, first game, 16:9, aspect ratio

Id: pRyGHdjes38

Length: 8min 50sec (530 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2023