Game made by hand drawing.

[fox33]

Hello everyone, i hope you have a good day.
My questions is more for the design than technical.
Well i want make a game by drawing on real sheet than scan it... ect
I did a first game already, but the thing is i used 1920x1080 resolution and my first game was huge in size because of this.

I read somewhere it's was not good to use this resolution in ags. idk if its still the case...
Im a bit confused im not sure what resolution i should take.
Too small its look like pixelated draw, not the best. And too big its its big in size... and apparently there is a limits of the size of sprite.
I dont really want make pixel art.

And for the menu and gui, its hard to make them on a big resolution, they look better in pixel...

I don't know what to do.
If someone could give me some hint and advice concerning this and anything for drawing hand game.

I appreciate.
thank you.

fox

[Khris]

I'd use 1280x720. People still have laptops that have native resolutions smaller than 1080p, but 720p should be fine for everybody.
That way the game size is roughly halved on top.

As for the GUIs, I personally dislike hand-drawn GUIs even with a hand-drawn game. I usually wouldn't mix pixel sizes but Whispers of a Machine pulls it off really great imo:

Spoiler

[close]

[Crimson Wizard]

For the reference, Dave Gilbert is making a 1920x1080 game in AGS 3.6.0:
https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/ags-games-in-production/old-skies-time-travel-adventure-by-wadjet-eye!-demo-available!/

AGS may still not be a perfect engine for that res, but it became somewhat better in the latest versions. You just have to be careful about amount of animating objects you put on screen simultaneously.

If full-HD is not a priority for you, 1280x720 seems a good alternative, as Khris mentioned. And yes, there's a problem with downscaling to a lower monitor size: downscaling a pixel game works horribly (it makes text barely readable too, because AGS currently scales whole game image in the window, also text is a part of the GUI images and is not rendered separately at the moment).

[Snarky]

AGS is not really designed for HD resolutions. It can be done, as Old Skies demonstrates, but you'll start to run into limitations (like the problems with downscaling that Crimson Wizard mentions) and performance issues. Dave Gilbert is an old hand at AGS and probably knows what he's doing, but without that experience I would recommend against it.

So your best options are to either go with a compromise resolution, e.g. 720p as Khris recommends, or use a different engine that is more suited for HD games. Godot + Escoria, Visionaire, Unity + Adventure Creator, and Ren'Py are engines/frameworks you might want to check out.

In any case, a higher resolution inevitably means larger file size (unless you were to use something like vector graphics), though some of these other engines can use graphics that are better compressed than AGS offers—for example, Ren'Py supports the webp format, which offers very high image compression.

[fox33]

Thank you very much guys for all those tips and advices. I may go with 720p.
I will make some prototype to see how its look.