[Solved] Game resolution and asset size

How do I...?
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General questions about game resolution and asset size.

Let’s say I’m making a 2D 1920x1080 game, and the main character is 200px tall.

  1. Does it make sense to add support for other game resolutions?
  2. If yes, and I’d like to support 4K for instance, should I add sprites that are 4x bigger, e.g. 800px for the character and resize it to 200px for 1080p, so that it has the full resolution of 800px in 4K?
  3. I checked many games on gd.games, and I see that generally they don’t have game resolution settings. Does it mean that whatever you play the game on, it will always be rendered in the resolution it was made for, and on larger screens it will just look softer?
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I do not know answer to your question
But i have answer to question you did not ask yet it may help you

Try using zoom for your game in and out and see how it works
Next try changing your desktop resolution

And you will know more than enough to not care about resolution

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That’s more of a question for you. If you are designing for 1080p, it should look the same at higher integer scale resolutions (3840x2160 is 2x resolution and a normal integer scale). There will be some distortion at non integer scale resolutions (2560x1440 is 1.333x resolution and not an integer scale).

There will be distortion at lower resolutions because you cannot make 3 pixels into 2 pixels without at least 2 pixels being squished into 1.

Some 2d games will start a lower resolution that scales effectively into multiple resolutions (such as 640x360) but thats generally for retro art that need exact pixel sizes. If you are doing more modern style art (think spiritfarer) then as long as you are using linear scaling you have SOME more flexibility when going up in size.

No. You will run out of GPU memory pretty instantly if you have a ton of 800x800 pixel sprites with animations since textures get loaded uncompressed. (One frame of 800x800 animation at 32bits color would be 800x800x4 or roughly 2.5 megabytes of ram for one sprite frame)

Many 2D games don’t have resolution settings in a lot of cases nowadays, and while you could add them, it doesn’t really give any benefits if you are adhering to the above for fullscreen games.

For windowed mode games there could be benefits since it’d ensure they keep the aspect ratio correct if they want to resize the window down.

Generally if you are sticking to integer scale resolutions it shouldn’t be noticeably softer.

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Thank you @ZeroX4 and @Silver-Streak!

I’m asking, because I already did some testing on my own and I noticed that when I change the resolution I need to adjust the camera zoom, and when changing to lower resolutions and adjusting the zoom, the image does look worse - more pixelated, so I figured on higher resolutions it would look better if I was using higher res assets.

But I didn’t realize that they get loaded uncompressed to GPU memory, that is good to know, and it indeed doesn’t seem to be worth it.

And the game I’m working on is not pixel art so it would not scale easily.

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