Resolution Scaling | Patreon Weekly #136

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, Patreon Poll #25 is running! Go there to vote about what specific levelgen improvements will be made in v1.2.0.

v1.1.2 is also going to go to beta very shortly. It’s mostly bugfixes, though I may look and see if I can make a couple balance tweaks as well. One notable bug I hope to address is save corruption issues that a few Android 12 users have been reporting.

Read on for more details about the desktop changes I’m making this week.

Next Fest Details

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I’m going to be participating in Steam next fest this February! That includes getting a demo running on Steam by that time. Here’s my rough list of priorities for that:

• Get Shattered Pixel Dungeon running through Steam for Windows/MacOS/Linux
• Implement demo-specific features, such as a special welcome message and a limiter on how deep the player can go.
• Resize the game’s base resolution for desktop (see below for details on that)
• Make base UI improvements, primarily so inventory can be in the main UI.
• Improve Steam store assets to make use of the better UI.
• Add Hotbar functionality (note that I’m lowering hotbar priority for the moment because demo users are far less likely to need it)
• Make further UI improvements and refinements if there’s time.
• Fix any bugs that crop up during next fest.

I expect that I’ll be publicly announcing the next fest demo in another two weeks or so, and I’m going to try and push to get the first three items on the list done this week.

Desktop Base Resolution

As with other Pixel Art games, Shattered has a base resolution that its graphics are designed for. Because the game is optimized for smaller screens, this resolution is pretty low: 240x160 in landscape and 135x225 in portrait. Obviously, phones have higher resolutions than that, so Shattered picks a multiplier for this resolution for the device based on its display density. Most modern phones have very high density displays, so the game will usually render at about 10x.

Desktop displays are usually much larger and less dense, so generally the game will use a much smaller multiplier, perhaps around 4x. The problem is that a standard 1080p desktop display could go as high as about 8x, which means that base resolution could afford to be much larger. Increasing the base resolution gives me a lot more space to work with in terms of UI, and it’s the reason why I’m going to be able to offer a dedicated desktop interface with things like an inventory in the main UI.

At the moment I’m planning to make the desktop base resolution 640x320. This has a few advantages:

• 2x the height and 2.67x the width of mobile landscape, loads of room for a fuller UI
• Interfaces designed for mobile landscape can easily be scaled an extra 2x to match with the desktop landscape layout (through redesigning them properly is the goal)
• Resolution width perfectly hits 2x at 720p, 3x at 1080p, 4x at 1440p and 6x at 4k, with height to spare for things like the taskbar.