Developing games has become the major part for the developers now a days. So while developing games, most the people face a common problem that how to hande Different Screen Resolutions for Mobile Games. Now a days there are many engines in the market like Unity 3D, Cry Engine, Unreal Engine, Construct2, Corona, Cocos2D etc. for the development of games. I will show you a basic technique to follow while handling screen resolution and you can apply these rules for the development of games in the different gaming engines. If we see different gaming engines, we see that most of them export games almost every platform.
Handling Different Screen Resolutions for Mobile Games
So, we need to setup our game at start, so that later on if we want to export it to multiple platforms then it should work fine. There are some other different techniques if we want to export for PC as well as mobile devices, to do this we need to reset our resolution some how but here I am going to show some tricks that you can use to export your game for all mobile devices like IOS, Android, Windows etc. So if we look at the different common resolutions of Android phone devices as shown below (as this data I have taken from android official website).
320 x 480 480 x 800 480 x 854 540 x 960 1280 x 720 1920 x 1080
And for the Android Tablets:
1024 x 600 1280 x 800 1920 x 1080 2048 x 1536 2560 x 1440 2560 x 1600
Now the thing here is, how to set the initial resolution for games so that all the assets fit well for all the screen sizes. To do that, take the value of the smallest screen size plus the value of largest screen size and divide the result by 2 as shown below.
e.g. 320+2560/2 = 1440
and
480+1600/2 = 1040
Note: Remember that most the gaming engine automatically compress or stretch all the assets according to the current screen size of the device.
So, we are done :). We have found the good resolution that will work good for all the screen sizes. But as we know, advance games don’t work on the small phones that have less resolution. So take the smaller value a bit higher like 540 x 960 in that case. Now, as we know that the resolutions of other Mobile platforms (like IOS, windows) lies between these, So we can just carry on with these rules and start developing our game. Now a question can be raised that what should be the size of sprite, asset or object should be, that work well for all screen size. So, lets say we have an object of size 200 x 200 and that looks good (while playing) at the resolution 1280 x 720. But to make that asset work great for all the screen size while playing the game, we have to make that asset according the aspect ratio of the average size that we have calculated above 1440 x 1040. If we are using Photoshop then we can increase the size of that asset at the aspect ration between 1280 x 720 and 1440 x 1040, so 200 x 200 will be 230 x 245.
Note: For PC, Xbox or Play Station, you have to find average aspect ratio accordingly.
So, as you have seen above, if you follow these rules before making your game and compile your assets accordingly, your game will work really well in all the screen sizes as stretching and compressing the assets is automatically done by the gaming engine. There are many other rules that we need to be care of while making games but this was one of those important techniques that has to be followed as well for efficiency of our game.
Tip: Try to use vector art of sprites used in games rather than the raster graphics. If you don’t know the different b/w these two, I have written an other article on the difference b/w these two, read that one by click on Vector vs Raster Graphics in Adobe Photoshop.
OK guys, this was all about it. Here you have learned different Screen Resolutions for Mobile Games. If you like it, and share it with your friends as well. Thank you 🙂
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