4:3 Resolution, Did it Hurt Your Sales?

[Garryg]

I have to admit this is something I never realy thought about. I mostly come from a background of making homebrew so 'widescreen' was never on the cards. One of the reasons I went to XP was the 'retro' aspect!. It didn't cross my mind that someone wouldn't play something because it wasn't in a widescreen ratio! Why!?


Then I still have CRT monitors and TV's for testing my other stuff on a 'real' screen

Hell, I have an MB Vectrex, an oscilloscope, and a vector monitor for testing stuff, never mind old CRT Monitors and TV's, so probably not your average gamer then

 

[Zalzany]

Yeah, it's iffy; on one hand, if you got the content to fill it without looking empty or cluttered, it's not a bad idea. I am working on 720, and you can see on the intro map that it's got space, but I am doing a dungeon crawler, so the rest maps are large enough; the issue is you can kind of see too much of the map, making a maze levels kind of moot lol.

But with default RTP assets, it's a kind of pain. Everything would be smaller, I am doing my renders for battlers and talking sprites and things like that, so it means I can knock those up a notch in quality. It's the main reason I am doing it, but it also makes sorting out when to hit return on text pain in the but. I've been using; I want to say, MAKO or one of those from MV. Even though I am on MZ, I load it up, made a fake mv game project file so I can open that, so it can pull all my images so I can see precisely what x and y to use when using them, and I use that to sort out where to hit return. Just copy-paste one text box at a time into the game; very tedious but means there are no half-formed letters in the text box or wasted space.

If you are not making your visual assets like images, you might be better off using a default lot of extra work to make it look pretty, but you end up with lots of extra space. If you are not using that extra space in cut scenes and whatnot, it's just dead space. Plus, unless using older the MV, you can click the max window, and it will resize it to fit; this means black bars on the side for default resolution, but yet again, what is the point of opening up that space unless you plan? On using it. People who complain about black bars are just as likely to be annoyed by space and more extensive than needed maps to fit the UI.