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
![Stick Out Tongue :P :P](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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