Hello. I know you are all probably getting tired of seeing threads appear from me and here I am again. lol
The past few days I have been playing around with dropping down to an ultra low resolution for my next game project (whatever that may be).
I decided on 128 x 90 resolution which scales up 10:8 to a full-screen 1280 x 720 resolution.
note: the border I just added to combat the light background on the page here.
And here it is scaled up to 640x360 ... the proportions change because width is scaled up 5X and height is scaled up 4X (that 10:8 scale ratio for fullscreen I mentioned above)
I keep telling myself "simplify... simplify". So I have made a few iterations to remove detail and try out different character sizes, etc. The above is what I am leaning toward at the moment.
Of course, I am still looking at colors including some intermediate colors used just to smooth transitions such as the mountains, sky and top of tree.
Anyway, I wondered what you folks do for ultra low res? Have you ever made a game in a ultra low resolution? By that I mean less than 256 x 144.
If so, what did you come up with?
I have played many
PICO-8 games and some of those devs do some awesome work in the 128x128 resolution with a palette of only 16 colors.
I really like all of the little touches of polish they add to PICO-8 games. Just super simple stuff like solid color circle explosions and circle smoke and so forth but it just works probably because of the low resolution.
PICO-8 128x128 Fixed 16-Color Palette Games
And I also played many #lowrezjam games. Again there is some great stuff... (found some better GIFs for 64 FISTS)
#lowrezjam Games using 64x64 resolution
Anyway... I really like the idea of going what I call Ultra Low Res (ULR). For someone who doesn't want to spend weeks, months and years on graphics alone... yet still
create a visually interesting game... I think ULR is the answer. Obviously, some attention, design and other effort is needed to produce something cool but this is different than iterating on a single character for days and weeks.
For me a game can have high resolution graphics even great art (as in looking at an image / single frame of animation in isolation) and still not be visually interesting. Yet other games can have lower resolution/simpler graphics etc and be much more visually interesting. So I place more importance on creating visual interest over raw art quality or tech stats.
What are your thoughts on it?
TI/994a (BASIC) -> C64 (BASIC/PASCAL/ASM/Others) -> Amiga (AMOS/BLITZ/ASM/C/Gamesmith) -> DOS (C/C++/Allegro) -> Windows (C++/C#/Monkey X/GL Basic/Unity/Others)