Recommended resolution?

[El Presidente]

I am planning for my game to use a 1280 x 1024 resolution as standard, but when I look at other Ren'Py games it seems that the most common is 800 x 600. My question is more or less if there is a good reason for that which I missed or if I can just go ahead and use any resolution?

Since Ren'Py uses OpenGL I guess scaling to smaller sizes should not be a problem even if I am positioning a lot of graphical objects on the background.

[IceD]

And you're right, because with OpenGL resolutions shouldn't be that much of a problem and with a bit of thought you can make games both for standard and wide screen aspect, increasing their portability. The only matter is the "crispiness" of art. Smaller images resized by OpenGL will have this blurry look on larger screens. It's a matter of fileszie and graphics choice - you should chose the resolution depending on the style of artists who will be making art for the game - styles with more "artistic", hand drawn feel won't be affected much by the OpenGL prescaling, while vector-based and cell shaded art may truly look a bit worse, when asset sizes are too small; it's not common though, and you should just run a few tests to see how the graphics will look with different resolutions.

For example, take a look at these screens: http://www.dropbox.com/gallery/8974472/ ... a?h=4dfb30.They're from Littlewitch's Girlish Grimoire, and those are by native 800x600 art assets, drawn by OpenGL on 1280x1024 screen. They are hand-drawn high quality art and you can see a bit of blurryness, especially on the edges but it's clearly visible only when you take a closer look and if you'll play quite a distance from your monitor, you won't see any difference at all. There's even not much, if only a little pixellation side-effect from resizing (thanks to bluring).

[El Presidente]

Thanks! Will do some tests when I'm ready for it, but will keep 1280 for now then.

[IceD]

Just remember, that such high resolution graphics will need alot more space than smaller ones. PNG is the one most flexible option to chose from (mostly because of many interesting features and transculency), but higher quality PNG assets weight quite a lot and you will propably need a lot of them; this may have a big impact on the final release of you have to care about the game file size.