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Hello, I have just recently brought AppGameKit and the hands on AppGameKit basic book and have decided to design my game now. But the problem is, what size do I set my graphics width and height to as AppGameKit is cross platform and supports multiple devices meaning that the screen sizes change also, which is why I'm stuck as I don't know what size to set my graphics to.

Any help will be appreciated, thanks

I tend to work with my "preferred" format for the game I am making, halve this for the virtual screen size, and double my graphics size for any small graphics. Sounds bizarre but my calculations lead me to believe this is a ideal configuration. For example:

Target screen: 1440x900
Virtual Screen size : 720x450

Icon graphics e.g 32x32 - design as 64x64
Midsize graphics - 1:1 based on target screen size.

This is not official, it's just the way I work. Small graphics can become easily distorted hence making them bigger than needed.

Welcome to AppGameKit Kieran.

It will come as no surprise that this gets asked a lot and there are almost as many answers as there are screen sizes

For starters, you have two "modes" of operation;

The Percentage System - where the x and y coords go from 0 to 100
The Virtual Resolution System - where you set a working resolution or use the native one of the device.

Both have their pros and cons and the board is split so you'll probably get opinions from both sides of this.

When it comes to designing the graphics, the important thing is to consider your primary target market and work from there.

For Windows, it's pretty much whatever you feel looks right
For mobile devices you would probably use higher resolution graphics for Tablets than you would for phones.

Whatever you go with, AppGameKit will do most of the work for you in terms of scaling, so the other things to consider are things like file sizes and device power.

For example, lower end phones are very limited on storage so if you are looking at these, you will want to be efficient and keep your files as small as possible.

I personally use the virtual resolution system and wherever possible work at the native resolution of the device - that way AppGameKit needs to do less scaling and so is less demanding on the CPU of smaller devices.

There are plenty of examples with AppGameKit and on here which you can use to try out ideas.

One important tip - a lot of devices prefer to use graphic files with resolutions which are a power of 2 - ie. 32 , 64 , 128 , 256 , 512 , 1024 etc.

You can chop these up once loaded, but it's a good idea to stick to these size for the graphics files themselves.

Thanks for your help, both of you. So from now on I will be doing my icons 64 x 64 and my width and height for IPhone will be using:

Width: 320
Height: 480

But will that mean if I want the game to play on all of the platforms I will have to re-compile the game each time with different width and height images to suit the device?

You can get away with that resolution if you don't mind a black border occasionally top/bottom or left/right.

Personally I don't find it very noticeable.

320x480 works fine on my android device. You get a tiny border but as baxslash says, not really too bad. It is easier to do it like that than to try to detect the screen size, and position everything to suit for each device anyway I'm pretty sure 320x480 should be supported by most phones. I have no other devices than android to test on presently though.