Hello!

I like the adventures of Wadjet Eye Games. They have many different settings, nice characters and story and some unconventional controls – fresh wind in the land of adventures.

But the graphics, the graphics! They are hand drawn (?) and beautiful, but sooo blocky. What do they use for a resolution, 320x240? People, it’s 2012, and even if it’s an independent developer, this is ridiculous.

Don’t get me wrong, I like pixelated graphics as a style element. Take e.g. FTL: it uses pixel font and frames without anti-aliasing and huge pixels. But, they also use a higher resolution like 1280x720, the ships are drawn with love with this pixel size, and the pixels are not scaled up.

An adventure does not need much. It does not need fancy effects and 3D super light half shadows. It needs a story, good characters and a picture to get the player into the scene. I don’t think I can get into it when everything I see are 2x2 size pixels and still have a tiny window of 640x480. (btw, that’s the resolution my monitors have since 1993 …)
When a company draws scene pictures and characters, is it more problematic to use more pixels? I think it would need nearly the same time of drawing but it would be more beautiful, because it still wouldn’t be 3D generated. So why not come into the 21st century and use something of 1280x720, or at least 800x600 (if it has to be 4:3 ratio, which also is something that >95% of all players, even the lovers of classical style games, don’t have anymore).

Graphics is not all, but without graphics, all is nothing. ;)

Just my 2 Cents …

What? I love the graphic style of Wadjet Eye games.

It kind of feels like you are playing Brown Sword or an early version of Monkey Island. Hopefully they continue to produce great games it this graphic style

Four words: sprite animation. Twice the dpi, eight times the work.

If you're worried about preserving the ratio, letter/pillar/window-boxing options are in. It's not 2009 anymore, after all!

Played gemini rue before and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of fans out there (just like me) loving this retro-styled graphic engine

(deal with it)

Ok, it is an issue if you draw every sprite pixel by pixel. Maybe it would need a bit more time. But definitely not four times the work if you have four times as many pixels, because it is almost more difficult to draw a character with that few pixels so that it still looks recognizable. If you have more pixels this work gets easier.

About sprite animation: why eight times the work? If I have doubled resolution for both dimensions, I need four times as many pixels, but this is only an example. The point is: if you need double time to draw a single image, you need double time to draw every image in all animations. Simple math. ;) So, having animations is not the reason. I don’t understand. In 2009 I had the same options, e.g. in DOSbox games. But those ARE old and did not have the means nor the need for high resolutions. (And dosbox has a very good interpolation mode for 2x-size which AGS does not have.)
Also: letterbox/windowing displays normalsizie pixels, but because monitors have more dpi nowadays, the image gets very small. Trying to upscale makes the image quite blurry.

And don’t come with anti-aliasing because that renders the font unreadable, as seen in Resonance. You surely won’t say that font quality is not essential because of reading the story and character dialogues? ;) Yes, but in those days the dpi was not that high on monitors.

I don’t need FullHD, but 320x240 does not look good, because of either (very!) huge pixels or a blurry image. Mostly you have both disadvantages at once (640x480 with 2x2 pixels, then upscaled to your monitor native resolution).

You need more images, too. Actually, no, it doesn't, at least in my experience. The pixels become bigger, but they keep their square shape. Integer scaling (e.g. 5:4 letterboxed, 16:10 fullscreen) is just more screen pixels to one graphic pixel and obviously can't cause any problems. I also tried the game on a 1366x768 monitor (pillarboxed, scaling factor 3.84) and I can assure you it still looks great.

(Anti-aliasing, however, does in fact look like shit. I don't know why AGS even has this option.)

Edit: as for the 2009 reference - AGS didn't have pillarboxing back then. Eww.

I understand. I don't like the blurriness, too. But I can get used to it. It would be better with higher resolution, of course.
Funny, but it (the game) is still more interesting, than anything else nowadays.

For their 32 bit color games, you can run the setup file, switch to DirectDraw5 and enable one of the HQ scalers for less blocky graphics.

See my post here for example screenshots from resonance:

I should probably wait until I get home so I can check instead of asking, but I will anyway: is whatever option you're referring to explicitly called HQ3X? Is it High Quality 3 X or something? I want to enable this when I get home because it looks like the anti-aliasing is done in a way that isn't utterly horrible like the standard DirectX anti-aliasing option, which is hideous.

I actually don't mind the pixelated graphics, but the screenshot you posted looked terrific.

It's just called hq3x. Note that it won't work for 16bit titles, and I actually haven't tried Primordia yet, so I don't know if its 16bit or 32bit. Blackwell games and Resonance are 32bit, but Gemini Rue is 16bit.

It also does not show up when using DirectX/Direct3d, so you gotta switch to DirectDraw.

Also, your monitor may have trouble dealing with 960x720 resolution - I know mine does. So when I want to use hq, I either end up using windowed mode with hq3x, or fullscreen mode with hq2x (640x480). Of course if you have a graphics card from a decent company (i.e. not Intel) the drivers should let you set up custom resolutions and scaling options which actually work, so unsupported resolutions would not be an issue.

Thanks! Now, for fun, can you tell me where your avatar is from?

for what it's worth I found a comment from the game's artist over on RPS, hopefully this will help explain why the game looks the way it does.

Pinback says:

The original art for Primordia is almost all high resolution. I paint each background or sprite in high res, scale it down and then clean it up pixel art style. But the game was designed to be low res for two major reasons;

1) First and foremost I love low res games. I wanted to see how pretty I could make a game in low res format, to see how far I personally could push the medium.

2) Painting high res backgrounds I find quite easy, it’s the animating of high res sprite that would have been restrictively difficult for me. There are quite a few animations in Primordia that took me like a week to do, having these anims in high res would have been too much work for one man I think, and the game would have looked much poorer as a result.

- Victor, Primordia Artist

Source: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/28/whirr-click-primordia-demo-release-date/#comment-1145118

Wouldn`t they use this style of graphic, i wouldn`t be interrested in this game. Not that i don`t like good graphic, but at a time where graphic seems to be all, it`s refreshing to have some games who are old school. Maybe in 5 years we can discuss about it, when 3D graphics are on a level when no time will be waste on being upset about details and so on.

Apart from it being a stylistic thing, it's a workload thing. The backgrounds could probably be done at a higher resolution quite easily (they're probably downscaled in order to be imported into the game anyway). The problem is animation.
Animation becomes more and more time consuming the higher resolution you do it at, particularly things like people. Ok, well why not pick 3x or 4x scaling then? Something closer to your monitor's native resolution. I play 320x240(/320x200) AGS games at 960x720, which is very close to my monitor's 1366x768. With "maintain aspect ratio" scaling it doesn't look at all blurry. True, high resolution graphics with the same framerate used in early 90s adventures (and games like Resonance and Primordia) looks terrible. Monkey Island Special Edition is a perfect example of this.
Higher resolution sprites require more frames to avoid looking jerky.