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[nexatt]

I'm working on a small GameMaker game with a friend and we're a little bit confused on how we should be handling the graphics. Typically, I draw the pixel art, upscale it three times its original size, then pass it along to be implemented in the engine. We realised we could do it a different way, which is just to change the zoom / camera level in the engine to show the same amount as if everything was scaled up, but while still keeping the visual assets at their original resolutions.

This has the knock-on effect of the actual output being technically much smaller because instead of working straight at 1920x1080, it's in actuality 640x360, just zoomed in. A small amount of file size is saved as a result, as well.

I know this sounds like a very amateurish question, but we're wondering if were going to run into roadblocks either method. Has anyone had any experience with this problem, and what is the generally recommended way?

Thanks!

[Glyph]

Keep it at the smallest size possible. If the graphics are upscaled 3x, then everything should be snapped to that 3-pixel grid -- and then, what's the point? Have the game handle everything at 1x and upscale the game window ingame. 640x360 is pretty big already but if you want then you can double the resolution or fit it to the screen in-engine. If it turns out blurry then consider drawing everything to a surface and drawing that stretched, since those don't blur.

[nexatt]

I see. Yeah, we haven't been working on a 3x3 grid so all the movement of objects and the camera has a very smooth feel to it that is a bit disorienting in a pixel game. It also meant that the lighting gradients were very smooth and didn't fit into the visual style very well. We'll definitely just be resing everything up in-engine from now on.

Thanks for the help!

[Dissident Dan]

The best way is probably to render to a low-resolution render target, and then scale that up to the final blit to the screen.

I haven't used GameMaker, but there are likely options for using "linear filtering" that does smooth blurring of the texture or "point" or "nearest" sampling that retains crisp pixel edges. It sounds like you would want the point/nearest option. I don't know what the terminology is in GameMaker. I'm just using the general graphics terminology.

[Boreal]

Also remember that upscaling offline will just end up consuming up to N² times the memory for if you scale by N.