Resolution, Upscaling and Downscaling

[rabcor]

I notice a trend among visual novel devs to make the games in a low, (usually 4:3) resolution (800x600, 1024x768, etc) i also noticed that an artist looking for a job in the recruitment section said he only does 1024x768 image resolution. Why is that happening?

As an example, Analogue: A Hate Story (Hate Plus at least) has it's images at 1024x640 resolution! that's insanely low! (And the most unclean folder setup/structure i've ever seen, my installation is loaded with empty folders it's a complete mess, but i guess Ren'Py doesn't mind a little bit of a mess.)

I didn't even consider having a resolution as low as that on my first (current) project, but i figured there must be a reason for this madness, so i decided to take some middle ground and use 1280x720, what i think of as the lowest i'd ever go, are there any particular reasons not to use higher resolutions like 1920x1080 or 1920x1200?

On topic here too i was wondering whether (in context with Ren'Py) it's better to rely on upscaling for people who want to run the game in fullscreen, or rely on downscaling for people with low resolution or want to use windowed mode. Is there any reason not to go with downscaling? I know much more about "mainstream gamers" than i do "Visual Novel players", so i don't actually know if most Visual Novel fans play in windowed or fullscreen, i always play everything in fullscreen myself (including VNs).

[LVUER]

Higher resolution needs more resources (I mean computer resources like RAM, processing power, storage space, etc). If you want to release commercial games, you need to think whether people have enough resource to play your game.

When creating art, when you want to make 1024x640, you need to work at at least 3 times of that resolution. That means at about 3072x1920. It suddenly become big, isn't it? Not everyone can buy a powerful PC.

[rabcor]

Powerful PCs are easy to come by these days, i could help any artist working for me get one (out of my own wallet) if he needed it for producing higher resolution images. And i find it hard to imagine a visual novel being RAM or GPU intensive, i really would need to make A LOT of things happen at the same time, or somehow manage to clutter the RAM with all the images in the game.

I also can't imagine Ren'Py using a lot of processing power, i'd guess that a couple hundred MHz core from the 90s would be able to handle it. Almost everybody has 4gb or more RAM these days which is a lot more than a visual novel should (ever) need. One thing i'm curious about though is why the artist would need to work at 3x the resolution the final image will be in?

[nyaatrap]

Animative VNs need lots of CPU power and RAM. Actually, many users reported my 1366x768 game (Demon master Chris) is slow and heavy on their machines and unbearable to play it.
Though if it's come to normal static VNs, then it should be fine. They don't need much of machine performance. Their main issues are resources quantities and arts qualities. For example, many free backgrounds are 800x600, so you can't make higher resolution with these.

BTW, I always draw images more than 3000px~. Why? because there's no reason to draw them in lower resolution. You can use many image editing functions without worrying quality losses in high resolution.

[SundownKid]

I personally feel like a 1080p VN is overkill, and judging by the success of Analogue, you don't have to be high-res to sell games. On the other hand, there's no reason NOT to downscale, since no one has ever reported performance problems with my own 1080p game.

[rabcor]

I see, interesting. (Note to self: Test the game on the lowest end laptop i have access to and see if i can't optimize it for that somehow.)

Thanks for your replies guys!