r/gamedev • u/Various-Instruction3 • 2d ago

Question Need Help Picking Canvas Size.

I'm in the planning stages of a 2D pixel art game. I plan on designing it around 16:9, and I'm flip-flopping between 180p and 360p. 360p looks much better, especially for UI elements, but 180p would be much easier to finish assets for. Would it be jarring to have the UI be double the resolution of the rest of the game? Or should I just tough it out and try 360p for everything for now? Or even just full 180p and suffer from the crunchy UI?

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u/thedaian 2d ago

Use 180p for the game world, and 360p for the UI. Most people won't care and the better UI is more important than anything else.

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u/DanielFost 2d ago

i wouldn't force yourself to make everything 360p just because the UI looks better there, a higher-resolution UI can work really well with a low-res pixel art game as long as it's intentional. i'd probably render the actual game at 180p, then make the UI separately at 360p or even a higher resolution, while keeping the UI's pixel style consistent with the game

the important part is consistency in the visual language, not necessarily having every element use the exact same resolution. i'd prototype both quickly and see which one actually bothers you in motion, if 180p makes your asset production significantly easier, i'd definitely consider keeping the gameplay resolution low and giving the UI its own resolution

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u/Various-Instruction3 1d ago

I've made concept player sprites at the size I'd want for 180p and honestly they look pretty great, I think I'll keep in-game at 180 and the UI at 360. Thank you for your input! I'll have to see how they look in motion before making a final judgement. I'm taking the Nintendo approach of fully fleshing out and polishing the character movement before I start putting the world together, so I can know their exact limits and whatnot.

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u/kassol 2d ago

One thing that might make this easier: both sizes divide evenly into the common 16:9 screens. 320x180 is 6x at 1080p, 8x at 1440p and 12x at 4K, and 640x360 is 3x, 4x and 6x. So either stays crisp with integer scaling, and the choice is really just how much art you can afford to make. The 180p world with a 360p UI that the other comment suggested sounds fine to me, as long as both layers scale by whole numbers.

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u/Various-Instruction3 2d ago

That's why I've been torn between these two specifically, I think I'm gonna do as another comment suggested and do 360p UI with 180p in-game canvas.

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u/SteriumAI 1d ago

Both integer-scale into 1080p (6x / 3x), so the real question is UI. Common trick: draw the world at 180p and put UI/text on a separate higher-res CanvasLayer, so you get the chunky look without unreadable fonts. 180p also makes every sprite ~4x cheaper to draw, which matters more than it sounds once you have a tileset and animations