Internal Resolution And Kaiju Size
I’ve been working on some tiles and characters in a new platformer perspective, but I’m stuck on what to make the internal resolution. I’m probably going to have the kaiju sized to about 80% of the viewport height and it may affect how big I make the floors on buildings. So I’ve put together some mockups and looked at what kind of in-game resolutions you get when you perfectly scale on some common monitor resolutions.
Resolution: 384x216
One of the things I find appealing about this is it doesn’t seem like too big of a jump from the old SNES resolution. It scales cleanly to 5x on 1080p resolution. It looks like Chasm uses this resolution based on screenshots. It doesn’t scale evenly to 720p which is unfortunate. Even now there are laptop being sold with 1366x768 resolution though I can’t understand why.
| Monitor Resolution | Zoom | Ingame Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| 2880x1800 | 7.5x | 2688x1512 |
| 1920x1080 | 5x | 1920x1080 |
| 1440x900 | 3.75 | 1152x648 |
| 1366x768 | 3.6x | 1152x648 |
| 1280x720 | 3.3x | 1152x648 |
Resolution: 480x270
I’m a little put off by the size as it’s quite large when you compare to the 256x224 from SNES era. Something like 120% more pixels on screen. It cleanly scales to 4x on a 1080p resolution which is only about 1x more than my preferred zoom level of 3x. The 5x zoom of 384x216 is already feeling like a bit much so I’m happy with 4x. Unfortunately, there’s a lot more wasted real estate on 720p. Looks like Stardew Valley and Tower57 both use this resolution.
| Monitor Resolution | Zoom | Ingame Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| 2880x1800 | 6x | 2880x1620 |
| 1920x1080 | 4x | 1920x1080 |
| 1440x900 | 3 | 1440x810 |
| 1366x768 | 2.8x | 960x540 |
| 1280x720 | 2.7x | 960x540 |
This uses the same size kaiju as the 384x216 mockup. The Kaiju doesn’t really feel big at this size.
Here I scaled the kaiju to the same relative scale as the 384x216 mockup. I like how you wouldn’t be able to see the top of the head as it walks towards you until it leans in. Something about it lurking above the screen makes everything feel smaller. I mean hiding Kaiju works for the movies, so why not here? I don’t think it negatively affects gameplay by hiding info from the player, though it does make it harder to animate. Also potentially causes some issues around pathing. For comparison, here’s the building-to-kaiju scale I originally wanted.
Foreground Objects
This isn’t really related to the above, but I was thinking about what it might look like to have foreground objects that can block your path as in a normal platformer. To make it visualy obvious, I was thinking of drawing the blocking objects in a skewed perspective.
Originally I was thinking that buildings were purely background object, but it might be interesting if they were foreground too. Maybe the suburbs area.
One thing that will help make the cities safer are hiding spots like these public restrooms. A toilet stall blocks the foreground here.