Resolution

The question of resolutions has aesthetic and technical dimensions.

Aesthetic

We must consider both how detailed the graphics should be, and how large the player should be relative to the screen.

Let’s look at other titles for guidance.

Mario

There is, of course, Mario. The original featured an eye popping 256×256 screen resolution and a character who is 16 pixels tall. The ratio here is 1/16.

Mario 2

I want to include the sequel to point out a different approach. Mario 2 had a larger screen resolution: 400×300. The interesting thing is that instead of maintaining the ratio of 1/16, which would have made Mario just shy of 20 pixels tall, instead they made the player twice that size! The new ratio was around 1/8.

The more detailed player avatar fit with the game because this one is more character driven. Think back to before Mario was a household name with a whole fictional universe — he was just a little guy running through levels fighting anonymous baddies for his stereotypical damsel. There was no emotional connection there.

When Mario 2 came out, Mario had gained in popularity. People liked the characters, and so they became emotionally invested. This was a game in which the player could choose which character to play, adding more investment.

So I’d like to propose the theory that the level of emotional depth in a game is related to the size and detail of the character relative to the screen.

Sonic

Sonic was Sega’s answer to Mario. Sonic is a real character moreso than Mario was ever intended to be. He has a history, friends, a sensible goal that we’re meant to care about. His distinctive character design draws us in. According to my theory, he should take up more of the screen, and he does. With a resolution similar to Mario 2, he stands 60 pixels tall, instead of Mario’s 40, putting this game’s screen to character ratio at 1/5, the largest ratio so far!

Castlevania

Moving to a more serious game, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night offers a depth in the storyline previously untouched. Here was a game really driven by story, and it successfully sucked in a whole generation of gamers. With a vertical resolution of 242 pixels and a character standing 55 pixels tall, its ratio is 1/4.4, beating out even the distinctive sonic.

Oddworld

Abe’s Oddysee is one of my all-time favorite games. The mechincs are intensely satisfying, and the visuals are superb, but what makes this piece really stand out is its personality. Completly unique premise with strong classical drama undertones, combined with really clever delivery, pitch-perfect dark humor, and a lot of soul combine to make this game a masterpiece. This is a case of a game that really tries to draw you in emotionally for your little pal Abe. It makes you really want to hate those darn sligs and slogs, and fear the deadly Scrabs. And guess what? With a vertical resolution of 480 pixels and a maincharacter standing 100 pixels high, the ratio is 1/4.8, neck and neck with the moody Castlevania. It’s worth noting that Abe, the main character, is actually one of the smaller creatures in the game. The docile Elum, terrifying Scrab, and evil Glukkon, are all substantially taller. This is a game that embraces detail.

Conclusion

Because the concept for my game is to be story and character driven, I am going to follow the example I’ve been given and aim for a 1/4 to 1/5 ratio of character size to screen size. Just as the technology of each of the preceding games affected its actual resolution (ranging from 256×256 in the 80s, to 640×480 in 1997), so will technical limitations affect my choice of resolution. I’m guessing it’ll sit somewhere between 1024×768 to 1280×1024.

Technical

Here’s a little mockup I did showing what characters of various sizes look like on screens of different resolutions. According to the research above, if I choose 1280×1024 (as I would like to), then I should have 256px sprites. If I choose 1024×768, I should have 192px sprites. For some reason if I use 800×600, I could choose 128px and be between 1/4 and 1/5 still.

It’s still too early to tell what resolutions the engine will be able to push once all the elements are interacting with each other.

Another consideration is that not everyone will have screens of a given resolution, and I want to maintain crispness. One option is to expose different amounts of screen depending on the player’s resolution, but as we’ve seen, the size of the character on screen will affect the player’s ability to bond. I want to maintain the ratio. Another option is to enforce a minimum resolution and have any displays with a larger resolution just display the game area in the center of the screen, surrounded by black (sort of how wide screen movies used to do it on standard sized TV screens). The overall picture would be smaller, but the ratio would be maintained.

I haven’t decided yet, but it’s all good food for thought.

1. 

   Matt Spencer says:

   November 14, 2009 at 10:45 pm

   Interesting, but I think the character-to-screen size ratio has nothing to do with the player’s emotional investment. The emotional impact that a character makes is dependent on the depth of story. The Mario games have always had an awful and shallow story, leaving Mario himself with a shallow personality. Consider the Final Fantasy 6 characters and the range of emotion displayed with sprites roughly the same size as Mario 2. Also, consider the game “Marvel vs. Capcom” and its giant sprites, and how the lack of story adds nothing to the characters’ appeal.

   I think your correlation is coincidence because as display technology progressed, so did everything else, allowing for longer games and deeper storylines.
2. 

   Pete says:

   November 15, 2009 at 8:11 am

   You make a good point; it was sloppy of me to draw the conclusion I did without controlling for other variables. I hope, though, that I didn’t give the impression that I thought this was the only factor. My original claim from the article is that emotional depth is “related to” character to screen ratio (in the statistical sense), which I still think is correct.

   I would point out one pedantic thing, which is that in FF6 when a character is riding in one of those robot things, the sprite to screen ratio becomes more like 1/4, the ratio of Castlevania and Oddworld. And incidentally, FF6 used character portraits too, which confounds the issue.

   But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a correlation, like you said. Two questions:

   1) If we accept from our small sample and intuition that games with higher ratios tend to be the ones with more emotional depth, then we have to wonder why. Is it because game creators find it easier to tell a story with an emotive character that has more detail? If that’s the case, then it still makes sense to make the character ratio large.

   2) If players have come to associate large characters with emotional depth, won’t they be primed to accept Kōtiro as deep when I present it that way?

   In other words, does the unfounded perception that size equals emotional depth become a self fulfilling prophecy?