Hello!

I would like to start the serie of posts talking about the making of with a basic graphical problem to solve:

Let’s say our game’s target screen aspect is 16:9 so we can show it in Full HD (1920×1080) or HD ready (1280×720) without problem, just resizing the image.

Most of the nowadays computer screens are Full HD, so this size seems perfect right? They would see the game like this:

But, what happens with the people using other screen resolutions like 1280×1024 or 1920×1200? Actually, the question you should ask is: what happens with the people using other screen aspect, like 4:3 or 16:10.

Then, you should think what do you want in your game: preserve the game aspect as you designed it or get advantage of the new screen size? Both are valid approaches but you have to choose one (or let the player decide with options).

Think about playing in a 4:3 format (using 1280×1024 or 800×600) and analyze the following image:

At the left image you can see the screen fully used (after a resize to fit the game elements in the screen).

At the right one, the game screen has been resized and adjusted to the center of the physical screen to preserve the original game aspect. This gives the game cinema bars, and it could be even an eye candy effect.

Which one to choose depends on the game type. For this game we chose to resize and adjust the game to keep the 16:9 aspect because we think that a game based on drawn backgrounds should be seen always in the same way; but, if we were making a tiled based game probably we would have take advantage of the full screen to give the player a bigger screen view.

The decision is up to you.