clear haven
Speaking as an absolute beginner, how do I know what dimensions to make my rooms/characters?
If I grab the source code of an existing PowerQuest game (e.g. Mr Coatrack) will that have the right settings?
I'd appreciate it if scaling/ratios are explained as part of the answer as well, thanks 🙂
winter rover
Really just depends on the art style you want to use. Easiest is going with the template (320x180 for the default template, which is the same as Coatrack).
For working out character size with pixel art games-, you can start by drawing the face and get it how you like it, and draw the rest of the character around that. Since the face has the smallest details that are important.
For aspect ratios, Rooms can pan around if you want them bigger. Or just pan left/right, which I like to do for nice parallax. So anything wider than the base screen (eg 320) will make the room scroll as the character walks across it. Then for people with 16:10 monitors it'll just scroll a bit more, and work out of the box.
For pixel art games it's best to draw rooms around the characters so you don't have to scale them too.
In high res games, scaling the character and zooming camera in and out isn't an issue, so that's an added benefit
Also, for pixel art games, I tend to go in multiples of 1080, so it scales nicely to monitors. Eg: 320x180, 384x216, 640x360
clear haven
Thanks, that's exactly what i needed!
verbal mantle
Fun related fact: you can just take the standard aspect ratio for modern monitors and TVs (16:9) and multiply it by an integer to get a resolution that will scale well on most monitors:
torpid bison
Very Helpful!
uneven latch
Easier, just take 320x180 and multiply the dimensions by 1-n. 2 = 640x360, 3 = 960x540, 4 = 1280x720, 5 = 1600x900, 6 = 1920x1080 - all the way up to 4k etc... The 1-n is just the size of your pixels. So at 1080p a pixel is 6x the size of 320x180. At 720p it's 5x, and so on.
dusty tulip
That's what I usually do - I design at 320x180 because of that, I mean, I could have a game that's 384x216, but then scaling up on a 720p screen I'd have original pixels the size of 2.5
if everyone was guaranteed to be using 1920x1080 then maybe 384x216 would be a cool resolution, it gives you more room for detail and it will scale up to a nice round 5x multiplier, but sadly everyone has different resolutions and aspect ratios 😄
