I’ve made some minor adjustments to the game lately, but nothing really worthy of packing up a new demo yet. I added some butterflies to the forest, added some basic joypad support… eh.
Recently, we’ve started questioning why Artemis is an 800×600 resolution game. We’re both big fans of low res pixel art, and the game is heavily influenced by role playing games for the SNES (256×224 res) and Gameboy Advance (240×160 res). So why did we ever make this game so high res?
At this point, lowering the resolution of the game would be a major undertaking – because it’s something I never planned for when programming the engine. But we’ve talked about it, and we can both see some obvious benefits.
The pros:
- We both prefer a lower res style.
- It would be faster to make sprites and tiles for the game.
- The game would run at a higher frame rate, which which give me the option of including features like weather and a day/night cycle. These features were previously in the game, but they caused too much slowdown in high res.
- The visual style would fit better with the audio style we prefer.
- Overhauling the project would give me an excuse to redo some of the things that have been bugging me, like the menus.
The cons:
- It would take tons of time to program this.
- It would mean getting rid of all of the graphics currently in the game.
I’m still not 100% sold on this, but I might start playing around with some code.
