Starting Monogame - Resolution choice and scaling

Graphics
1

Hi all,

Game developing has always been an interest of mine and nearly finishing up Uni I want to start planning something half decent to create.

I helped another on a small game project using flash and action script, it was a simple platformer type game. We used 24x24 pixel blocks and a resolution of 320x240 but scaled x2.

This meant drawing about 13x10 blocks per screen with the art content being made to 24x24 size, but scaling it all x2 made a decent viewing resolution.

I was wondering if something similar is a good starting plan for a simple platform like game I plan to make, however my choice was more on the lines of:

16x16 blocks
480 x 270 resolution (can scale 2x to 960 x 540 or 4x to 1920 x 1080)

A recent favourite game of mine is Axiom Verge (which was created in monogame!), I have looked into a bit and it seems to use a resolution of 480 x 279 with 16x16 blocks. I guess 279 is chosen to fit that last bit of the block in (270/16 is just under 17 whole blocks).

Just wondering if anyone has any advice for me to get under way :slight_smile: about anything really, but also looking for any further comments on 270 vs 279 for a height choice. (279 seems bad as it would not fit 1080 screens at x4?)

Thanks!
Lozzajp

2

I found it easier not to do traditional tile-based stuff… Hardware is so powerful you can easily draw things as big sprites, rather than compose every little thing from little tiles.

That said, what I do for tile systems is have variables for things like “tile_width” “tile_height”, “row_count”, “column_count” etc, and then you can just tweak their values and easily see what suits you the best.

I have had a good experience drawing the final image to a render-target, which I can then scale and draw. This lets you easily adjust to ANY screen-size.