Thanks sindbad, I'll look into the alternatives. You've been a great help so far.
Now then, I have a question for the potential players of this game, whether it be on the Pandora or other systems: what would you think of the game being in 400x240 resolution, and scaled up to 800x480? I have the necessary experience required to create scaling algorithms, either through pixel shaders or C extensions, so it won't be crappy nearest neighbour or bilinear quality unless you like that sort of thing. (might need help if anyone wants me to implement hq
nx though
The code isn't even commented and optimized to all hell)
There's a few pros to this:
- Easier to code. Upscaling a smaller screen will easily outperform using the larger resolution, which means I have less evil optimizing to do, which means I can focus more on getting things done.
- Halving the resolution will greatly speed up my productivity. Not only do I have a lot more art assets for that resolution than 800x480, halving the resolution means for pixel art I only have a quarter of the work per asset to do. This will help me get things done more easily.
- Portability. I'm not sure if this will be a big factor, but I'm putting it here either way. I believe for instance it might be able to be ported to PSP, though I only glanced at Python/Pygame on PSP at best so I don't know details. 400x240 resolution means it would fit on the PSP's screen, although whether the effort gets far enough for this to be workable remains to be seen.
- Full screen post processing. Because the game will run a lot faster there's a lot of idle time that I could use for postprocessing tricks to make things look all pretty. I realize a lot of people couldn't care less about this, but as someone with a heavy focus in graphics programming I find this to be almost the most fun part of the whole process.
Of course, the drawback is the low resolutioness. Not even a good scaler can offset that entirely. On the other hand, some people might associate this with a retro kind of feel and appreciate it.
To give you an idea of what you might be looking at, I took an old mockup and scaled it up in a few ways:
unscaled,
nearest neighbour,
bilinear,
scale2x, and my personal favourite
scale2x/bilinear blend
So, does anyone have a strong opinion on this either way?
I would much rather have the higher Res option.
However, I would probably still like it even if you did choose the lower Res.
-God Ginrai