The original version of The Spirit Engine was created in an era of bulky 4:3 cathode ray tube monitors, where 640x480 was the most common screen resolution. The game ran in a 490x400 window and that seemed OK at the time.
Twenty years later, desktop displays look very different! TSEDX supports a range of resolutions up to 3840x1080 (32:9) and 3840x2160 (4K)!. This is over ten times the visible area to display. Since the original game is scrolling, the task didn’t seem too daunting - until we got to work.
First, the entire UI needed to be re-designed. Most of the backgrounds needed to be drawn outwards to support larger screens, from deserts and marshes to trains and skyscrapers. Some skill effects relied upon a fixed top screen edge. Even one notable boss whose body used to be off-screen now needed to be drawn in its entirety. Some of the cutscenes rely on characters appearing from off-screen positions and so we’ve needed to come up with clever new ways to rewrite their entrances.
Below are two example cutscenes that needed a lot of work to scale up from their original 490x400px display, both involving methods of transport (click for the full versions):
We chose 1920px and 600px as our upper limits for width and height respectively. 1920px width was needed to support 32:9 if we wanted to keep a 540px height that could scale, and 600px is intended for 16:10 resolutions.
Going past a 960px width for a pixel game is rarely explored due to the work required, but we think the effort has been worth it!
- Mark and Aquellex
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3424270/