Visual Settings for New Games

[obiwan21]

May keep on adding to this, but wanted to start off simple. I also wasn't positive if this was the best place to ask this.

In short, starting a new game. Been just using placeholders, but time to actually build items out. In people's experience with games they play, what is a good resolution to have my game be? Since it will be Renpy, I have to set it now. Of course, I can make big renders and down size, but i'd rather correctly to avoid resizing artifacts.

I was demoing it out at: 1280x720 and saw some good games at 1920x1080.
Trying to keep the 16:9 ratio.

Any help is... helpful

 

[lodadsaq]

1080 or 720 is good
as far as im aware

 

[Papa Ernie]

May keep on adding to this, but wanted to start off simple. I also wasn't positive if this was the best place to ask this.

In short, starting a new game. Been just using placeholders, but time to actually build items out. In people's experience with games they play, what is a good resolution to have my game be? Since it will be Renpy, I have to set it now. Of course, I can make big renders and down size, but i'd rather correctly to avoid resizing artifacts.

I was demoing it out at: 1280x720 and saw some good games at 1920x1080.
Trying to keep the 16:9 ratio.

Any help is... helpful

File size and image type are also considerations. Unless you need the alpha channel for transparencies (png), I suggest rendering to the jpeg format. Way too many 1+ GB "demos" coming out lately due to huge file sizes. Of course you can always compress/convert files after rendering, but why not skip the extra work?

 

[obiwan21]

File size and image type are also considerations. Unless you need the alpha channel for transparencies (png), I suggest rendering to the jpeg format. Way too many 1+ GB "demos" coming out lately due to huge file sizes. Of course you can always compress/convert files after rendering, but why not skip the extra work?

Good point. I already noticed my portraits go from 1mb to 60kb by just adding some compression.
I wouldn't mind doing the compression, but I am still wondering if more people are preferring the larger video size. I know I find myself upping to 1920x1080 on the unity games when the option is present.

 

[baka]

i suggest 1920x1080 if you can. rendering will take longer time for you but it will be beneficial for people that likes high resolution and most monitors have 1080p as default and it will look ok for those that have 4k.

 

[Palanto]

Renpy is pretty simple in that case, since it resizes itself to the monitors setting, so doing it in 1080p is fine. So for everyone with a lower screen resolution ren'py takes care of that itself. For everyone with a higher resolution, well they will just have it in 1080p then which is still full HD and probably enough for a VN style game . About the file size someone mentioned, well if you want REAL HD you keep the .png as is, only mobile versions like android and iOS should use compressed images. There is only one thing possible, real HD with 1920x1080 .png's or pixelated non full HD with 1920x1080 .jpg's or webp's or whatever. So if you want quality don't give a damn about people who complain about the size (we're in 2018 if people don't have disk space for 2 - 3GB games they've done something massively wrong). So if you don't care about the quality and want to compress the images you can just go with 720p right away cause you won't reach real HD with compressed images, then you don't need to pretend either

 

[baka]

the above statement for jpeg is not entirely true. jpeg have compression settings, and can be adjusted to not destroy "too much". for colorful/real pictures jpeg is good enough. but, with black&white, drawings, text with solid background using jpeg could make it look bad. we use png when we want lossless and when we need alpha/opacity. gui should be a lossless format, such as png.
a 1080p jpg > 720p png in quality, the difference in 1080p jpg and 1080p png is almost none, maybe some pixels if you zoom up, but usually it "smooth" together in a way we can't perceive it. i say try both jpeg and png and see for yourself, with jpeg use a low compression factor. yes, when you "render", use png, so that you have the "original" yourself. and after that you can covert it to jpeg if you want. but, do not worry, if you prefer png, go with it!

 

[Papa Ernie]

Renpy is pretty simple in that case, since it resizes itself to the monitors setting, so doing it in 1080p is fine. So for everyone with a lower screen resolution ren'py takes care of that itself. For everyone with a higher resolution, well they will just have it in 1080p then which is still full HD and probably enough for a VN style game . About the file size someone mentioned, well if you want REAL HD you keep the .png as is, only mobile versions like android and iOS should use compressed images. There is only one thing possible, real HD with 1920x1080 .png's or pixelated non full HD with 1920x1080 .jpg's or webp's or whatever. So if you want quality don't give a damn about people who complain about the size (we're in 2018 if people don't have disk space for 2 - 3GB games they've done something massively wrong). So if you don't care about the quality and want to compress the images you can just go with 720p right away cause you won't reach real HD with compressed images, then you don't need to pretend either

Just for clarification, I mentioned size as a factor not due to storage but to the fact a lot of people have slower internet speeds and data caps, especially in rural areas (ex. I used to live out in the country and had a 10GB/month cap. Downloading a 1GB file for a 5 minute game was unfeasible).

 

[obiwan21]

All very fair points. I don't want quality to suffer, but I also don't want to have 1GB+ game until I'm pretty far along.

Thanks for the help. I have decided on 1080 and will monitor the file sizes. I'll render a few scenes at full and tweak a bit to see. I'm also downloading some games and seeing what their average file sizes are.

 

[anne O'nymous]

Thanks for the help. I have decided on 1080 and will monitor the file sizes.

Reading this can also help you :

You must be registered to see the links

 

[obiwan21]

Reading this can also help you :

You must be registered to see the links

Nice! Thanks dude. When my game menu renders out at like 3MB, I definitely need to work on optimization, lol

 

[Cyan]

I'd be a little confused to see 720p with PNGs.

IMO, stick to 1080p (Or higher) with PNG or high quality JPGs, people are sticklers for quality.