In mobile devices, to scale down or up? That's the question!

[GhostGK]

Expert devs, I've been trying my hand at making a small mobile vertical SHMUP game & I want to ask a question about screen resolutions..

I want to do a high-res pixel art style with bitmaps assets..

And, I want to support as many screen resolutions & aspect ratio as possible.. (as an exercise)

I got the scaling with aspect ratio part down, thanks to many tutorials..



But, the problem is when I found out mobile screen resolutions go as low as 240 x 320 or as high as 1280x1920!



So, do I make the art in low res & scale up, resulting in low-res pixel arts? (not ideal art style)

Or, do I make the art in high res & scale down for low res devices, resulting in distorted pixels? (Maybe a sharder can fix that?)



In the first place, is it even pratical to worry about mobile device with that low of a resolution?

What is the minimun res you guys design for?



Sorry for too many questions..

If i'm looking at this the wrong way, or being stupid, pls do let me know!

[Xyga]

No developer here but I will tell you this as a long-time gamer on all possible supports: whether you offer to scale up or down always use clean integer values or something close-enough that we don't have to use very blurry/muddy shaders.

Because there's no point in doing pixel-art if you're going to slap a crappy blurry filter on it (yes thay're all crap those filters).

Shmuppers like it crisp and clean period.

[GhostGK]

Shmuppers like it crisp and clean period.

So do I, as a Shmupper & gamer in general..!!
Having to correct the look with shaders would defeat the purpose of doing Pixel Arts In the first place!

Maybe I could reach a compromise.. Set a minimum resolution that's practical & scale up from it (cleanly, as you said!)

For a small percent of mobile devices with lower res than that minimum, I'll figure something out like, making a separate low res assets or something..

(Tho I really want to keep the players' experience the same across all devices!)

That'll require me to do some research on the mobile devices most commonly used to get the data right & to get my artist to do more work too..

[trap15]

It's impossible to cleanly integer scale for all the thousands of mobile resolutions out there. I say aim for the highest bar and scale down with a nice algorithm. Scaling down always always looks better than scaling up.

[GhostGK]

It's impossible to cleanly integer scale for all the thousands of mobile resolutions out there. I say aim for the highest bar and scale down with a nice algorithm. Scaling down always always looks better than scaling up.

That's a very curious response!
I never thought Scaling down could look better than scaling up!

What kind of algorithms can achieve that? Can you pls give me some examples?

I was going to upscale from a minimum supported resolution, & let the dynamic scaling handle lower res..
A good scaling down algorithm would definitely help a lot!

[pieslice]

This is a less of an issue with newer devices, because resolutions ranges nowadays start usually around 800x480.
But I've been doing mobile stuff for about eight years for now. In the late 2000's vastly different resolutions were real issue. We usually did completely different set of assets for different resolution ranges (screens were divided between the amount of pixels, like 40 kilopixels (176x208 range), 80 kilopixels (qvga), 240 kilopixels (vga) etc.
Artists scaled the assets in photoshop and hand-edited them to look as best as possible for the resolution. Of course this requires vast amount of work and is not viable for small indie dev.

With modern devices, I would suggest you limit the supported devices; choose viable minimal resolution. Also you should adjust your game to work with different sized screens & aspect ratios, eg. the playfield scrolls more if there's less space in screen. If things get too cramped, just halve the scale.

[pixelcorps]

Pro gfx artist since `89 here.

Scale down.

Scaling up will always look fluffy, scaling down keeps things crisp.

If you`re doing pixel art, retouching scaled up artwork is a total nightmare.

Scaling down and retouching is much faster, looks better and obviously have a lower pixel volume to clean up.

[gray117]

Scale down. But as suggested don't get too hung up on it. Choose a native res and work with that. At certain larger sizes you'll find assets deal with scaling up or down better simply because there's more samples to take... Presuming your assets/style isn't super fine noise contrastness.

Should you ever want to produce another set is of lower res assets you'll likely find you can largely automate the process with acceptable results until you get to the very smallest sizes where ideally you'd likely want a bit of tidying (ignoring or overstating some of the finer details in the interests of crispness).

[GhostGK]

Thanks for all the responses..!!

I got real good advices..
As everyone suggests, we'll chose a native resolution for the artstyle we want & go with it!

I'll try to post some results & samples at different resolutions later when my artist has produced some assets..

[waiwainl]

+1 for not scaling If not needed.
With Android you can have multiple asset sets to support multiple DPI's, make good use of that.

[Rozyrg]

+1 on scaling down here too

I'm not super experienced with mobile dev; but I at least know from playing both classic Sega arcades and 16-bit console games with comparably much 'cheaper' scaling solutions which consistently looks better in terms of pure aesthetics.

Scale down. But as suggested don't get too hung up on it. Choose a native res and work with that.

Bingo.

[Sasupoika]

Working on native resolution is golden, you get consistent style (especially if you are working with pixel art)
Otherwise scaling down in general.