The battle of the pixels

I love setting up new projects. And I think that’s the thing I’ve done the most in my indie gamedev “career”, and I’m sure I’m not alone in that 😁. I setup dozens of them for the next big idea, and although it has its downsides, it also teaches me a few things every time.

So in any case, besides working on the game design for The Mech League I’ve setup a new project (as you can see from my previous post) and one of the first things I needed to decide was: what kind of resolution I’m going for?

This being a “DOS” game I decided to go with the most common one, which is 640x480, 256 colors. However, I’m obviously making a few concessions here and there, but one of the biggest is that I’m going to use square pixels instead of the “original” squashed ones. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should really read this: No, MS-DOS games weren’t widescreen: Tips on correcting aspect ratio

Basically, I’m creating everything in said resolution, then using the Unity “Pixel Perfect Camera” component to make everything scale nicely & pixels to align to integer positions. I’m also adding some cropping, but I might make that a bit “spicier” later 🙂.

Another technical decision is going with Unity’s internal engine instead of URP, and I might write about it later, but I’ve had some trouble with scaling to non-integer multiples of 640x480 using the later (there is probably/hopefully some knob to tweak to fix it, but I don’t have the time to spend hours on that).

Finally, you can also see the placeholder art I’m working with for now, although I really spent too much time on that CRT 😂. It’s also using real VGA colors from the default VGA palette! (Or I tried, but my art software of choice did some antialiasing at the edges, so there are way more colors than 256 😁):

P.D. I’m trying to setup a mailing list for this devblog, although I’m having some trouble getting my account approved, so I’ll write a quick post about it when I have it done. For now, if you really want to be notified you can just write a comment here and I’ll reply to it when it’s done 🙂.