I'm working on a project right now, and from the beginning I've held the notion that the game will be at a resolution of 1024x768 and nothing else. especially nothing lower than that. If I decide to allow it to go bigger... ie people who run wide screen laptops might want o run fullscreen I would just add black border padding to keep the aspect ratio correct.

My question is how turned off would you be if when browsing through a download portal like steam or D2D, you saw a cool looking game, but in the requirements it stated "ONLY RUNS at 1024x768 RESOLUTION, WINDOWED or FULLSCREEN." ?

My game is a casual game and I designed it so that the player can start it, jump into the game and finish a level in 10 - 30 minutes and still be able to watch tv . I guess I always visioned the game being played windowed, to make it easier to minimize when the boss came walking by.

I know other games in the past have done this, Civ 3 comes to mind, and it had no problem selling millions. And if steams reports on the hardware people have are accurate, only 8-10% of my target audience would be forced to play the game in fullscreen. The rest would have no problem playing in windowed. (that is ~8% people have a resolution with a height 768 or lower).

For me it would be an immediate turn-off. I expect any game (indie or no-indie!) to have a full spectrum of resolutions available. I do make allowances and would probably play it if the game was good, but my first impression would be a screaming giant sign of "LAZY!" plastered all over my face.
Don't get me wrong. Sometimes running a single resolution is necessary or even preferable (e.g. Consoles). But having the option locked-in would suck - I have displays all over the place (1680x1050, 1920x1080, 1024x768 and one or two more that are obscure enough to make me forget the numbers); notice that only one of those wouldn't have to scale your game! Lots of old games are locked in, so I guess you'll be fine, but it seems like such a trivial thing to add that it just screams MEH from the developer to me?

And, IMHO, no no no to black borders - unless I am watching a cinematic or something I do NOT want to have black borders all over my screen no matter how causal the game is that would be a no-sale for me (and quite a lot of other people - I guess it depends on how extreme we are talking here, but I got an image that made me cringe; not just bottom/top bars but basically a black-boxing type of deal...)

Anyhow, good luck to you and your game!

I wouldn't be offput if it was 1024*768 in a window but fullscreen and with black borders I would be (my resolution is 1920x1200 so there would be hideous amounts of black). No reason why you can't limit it to 1024*768 but stretch it to fit. I don't mind little black bars down eitherside as much.

Maybe I'm just a bizarre gamer... but I haven't run a game fullscreen in a several years now. but having a 32inch monitor still allows for big resolutions. I just multitask alot I guess, example this is what is running on my desktop at the moment. Torchlight, iTunes, windows Media Player, Visual Studio, Photoshop, Firefox, several folders, notepad++, and steams download window. All of them are visible and accessible at any one time.

Also I guess I should've stated the biggest reason for aiming for a static resolution is the game is 2D, and uses hand drawn graphics. Stretching and resizing these images cause horrible blurring and artifacts. aswell as allowing widescreen would either cause strange empty spaces... or allow a unfair advantage to those with a widescreen.

Thank you for your response though, I'm just trying to get peoples honest feelings on it.

I use a UMPC pretty heavily these days, but its native resolution is 1024x600. Its kind of upsetting when I can't play a game on it due to these kind of restrictions.

In the past I had CRT so I would not mind. But now I have LCD and it is crappy in all resolutions other than native. I do appreciatte higher selection of resolutions in games. Hard to tell if it would make me not but the game... probably not. It also depends on amount of text ingame (more reading = better resolution desired).

Why don't you make rendering in one resolution and then resize it to fit the screen no mater the resolution selected? Or even better, resize the game screen and put dynamic interface on top of it (I think they did it this way in Civ 4).

World of Goo runs at a fixed resolution of 800x600, and is a massive success.

If your game is good and is marketed well it will sell; there is now a growing market of gamers who will buy and play games but don't even know what resolution is. There are plenty of gamers who simply won't care. There are plenty of gamers that will care but will try your game anyway if they hear that everyone else enjoys it.

Doing things "properly" is nice, but actually releasing a finished product is better.

Hope that helps!

It would be a strike against, for sure. Mentally, when I see a game with just one resolution setting, it makes me think that the development team cut corners on things like compatibility and features, so I go into it expecting the game to have problems that might break the experience for me. I don't actually make games, and what little I know about the process I learned here, but I assume that ubiquitous features like resolution support is something that can be "dropped in" from some kind of readily available toolkit, like it's some kind of module or something. Since I believe it to be trivial to code-wizards, its absence makes me think that the game is not the real deal, but instead some kind of lame project that was made in a hurry as a midterm in a college class.

World of Goo runs at a fixed resolution of 800x600, and is a massive success.

If your game is good and is marketed well it will sell; there is now a growing market of gamers who will buy and play games but don't even know what resolution is. There are plenty of gamers who simply won't care. There are plenty of gamers that will care but will try your game anyway if they hear that everyone else enjoys it.

Doing things "properly" is nice, but actually releasing a finished product is better.

Hope that helps!

I forgot about WoG, and thanks for the uplifting reply.

It would be a strike against, for sure. Mentally, when I see a game with just one resolution setting, it makes me think that the development team cut corners on things like compatibility and features, so I go into it expecting the game to have problems that might break the experience for me. I don't actually make games, and what little I know about the process I learned here, but I assume that ubiquitous features like resolution support is something that can be "dropped in" from some kind of readily available toolkit, like it's some kind of module or something. Since I believe it to be trivial to code-wizards, its absence makes me think that the game is not the real deal, but instead some kind of lame project that was made in a hurry as a midterm in a college class.

I'm not trying to say adding support for different resolutions would be hard, it's the fact that the game play is based on that resolution and changing it otherwise would break gameplay. This will be my first game I go head strong on and actually put all my effort into getting it published and available on some market. I was just curious about how people would react to having to run it windowed or be forced to play a stretched out game.

I don't actually make games, and what little I know about the process I learned here, but I assume that ubiquitous features like resolution support is something that can be "dropped in" from some kind of readily available toolkit, like it's some kind of module or something.

It's not quite that trivial -- don't get me wrong, it's not overly difficult if planned for, but it's distinctly non-trivial -- supporting multiple resolutions means you need to either scale your graphics to fit, have multiple graphics of different sizes or some combination of the two. If you're stretching your graphics will you allow them to stretch to whatever size the player has (potentially leading to problems with the game in years to come), or will you set a theoretical maximum?

You have to decide how to deal with different aspect ratios; should you letter-box wide screen monitors, display more of the playing field, or perhaps show the usual playing field but add an additional graphic that is not visible on a non-wide screen? You could simply stretch your graphics, but you might end up with things being oddly shaped and looking squashed or stretched. If you decide to support multiple options and let the player decide then you've got more code to write, and more different situations that need to be tested.

You have to take into account that your decisions may impact game-play; if your game is multi-player and you've decided to show a larger playing area on wide-screen monitors then you may be giving some players an unfair advantage. Even a single-player game where achievements are awarded or scores are submitted to an online scores-list may lead to complaints of unfairness.

If you're already handling multiple resolutions will you also support multiple monitors (which are becoming increasingly common), and if so how will you do so? If you're not going to support multiple monitors will you provide an option to black-out an unused second or third monitor?


Supporting multiple resolutions certainly isn't the most difficult thing in the world, and I appreciate that your point of view is probably one shared by a lot of players who don't know much about the development process, but it certainly isn't trivial; there is a very real cost in time, effort and potentially money involved in deciding to support multiple resolutions, and it's a decision that may in some cases impact gameplay as well.