small garnet
so i'm working on remaking a project i started in gamemaker and reconsidering some design stuff involving screen resolutions, and i'm curious what approach you all might take in this situation.
so i'm working on a game in a sort of snes+ visual style. normally the best solution for compatibility with a wide range of displays is to simply make your viewport/game resolution 320x180 and it will integer scale on just about everything. that's even what i did at first. but over time with testing it became clear that the characters were too large on screen and too little of the environment could be seen so I needed to work in a larger game resolution. after trying a bunch of what's possible in that engine i settled on a dynamic resolution system that runs the game at a size that scales evenly on any arbitrary size screen by adjusting how much or how little was shown. if you're on 720p or 1440p the game runs at 426x240 but at 1080p or 4k it runs at 480x270 instead, showing more environment. this worked well because the game was couch co-op and single player only at the time and let it show an integer scaled image at any size, even arbitrary windows. the screen would show more or less depending on your display, but everyone is looking at the same display anyway.
but i'm restarting in godot with online multiplayer instead of couch only in mind from the start and that's making me reconsider a bit. some things are different now. each player has their own screen and camera and players can walk offscreen of each other when the map is large enough. it's still a purely co-operative experience and not competitive, so there isn't really a worry about unfair advantage, but i'm still a little unsure if that is still the best option or not.