What's been on my mind today is the size of Flash games. Not the minutes of
gameplay, number of levels or the
file size, but the
amount of physical screen-size the game occupies. There are 2 competing forces pulling in opposite directions here - the world of slick experiential websites as showcased by
thefwa is trending towards high-resolution, full-screen,
immersive experiences, and many of these sites are games. On the other hand, there is the world of game-portals and indie-developers keeping resolutions lower, where the game only occupies a part of a larger HTML layout. Here's some positives and negatives of each approach:
High Resolution (i.e. 800px+ in width, often full-browser or even full-screen)Positives:
- More immersive.
- Occupy a decent percentage of a high-resolution monitor.
- More room for gameplay elements and user interface.
- Greater detail possible in artwork.
- Artwork right-size to port to console
Negatives:
- Slower performance.
- No keyboard support in full-screen before FP10.
- No room for anything else on the page.
- May not actually fit on monitors of netbooks / older computers.
Low Resolution (i.e. 400-700 pixels wide):Positives:
- Much faster performance / less variation between new and old computers.
- Leaves room to sell advertising around the game (decide for yourself if this is a good thing).
- More flexibility for use on HTML pages - e.g. "Add this to my site" embedding etc.
- Pixel art looks better in low-res games.
- Artwork right-size to port to mobile / iPhone
Negatives:
- Games get completely lost on high-resolution monitors, especially laptops where the pixel-density can be much higher (e.g. on 15inch screen with a 1800 pixel width, the average Flash game is only a couple of inches wide)
- Less immersive, further away from the console experience
It's a tricky problem with no right answers. I think a wide-screen format of something like 760x400 works quite well across all devices and is a good compromise. I haven't checked the exact numbers, but many portals are still restricting to around 640 pixels wide, presumably so they can sell add-space around the game and maximise the number of devices that can see the content,
and Kongregate needs to fit in their chat window, for example. I think this
restriction is a bit of a shame.
But hold on a minute! Flash is a re-scalable technology, right? So can't we make games that work at any size? Well, yes and no. Vector graphics scale nicely, but performance suffers at higher resolution. Bitmaps scale up smoothly but aren't so great scaled down (Remember to turn allow smoothing on in your library and/or code!). For pixel art there is the option of turning smoothing off, too. There is hardware scaling on full-screen mode, but text and some graphics start to look a bit strange to me. I think the ideal situation might be to be able to build your game at 1280x720 (720p) and scale down to the correct window size. This is how
XNA handles both
HD and SD TVs when publishing for
Xbox. I don't think the current generation of computers is quite up to this in Flash though, without hardware acceleration. In general Flash does do a much better job at
upscaling than you would expect, and if you build with
rescalability in mind, it's a bit more work, but you can generally pull it off. Portals should maybe start offering the option to have alternative resolutions - like
Flashkit used to!
Do we mind playing tiny games on our huge monitors? Should a Flash game be thought of more like playing a gameboy or iPhone within a window than a playing a traditional PC or console game? Leave your thoughts in the comments please!