Tuesday 12 March 2013

supersize me

Experimenting with the possibility of releasing a higher-resolution version of The Royal Trap.

For comparison, a screenshot of the normal-size game (gaaaaah, blogger wants to wrap everything in its 'friendly' interfaces which completely ruins the point of trying to show things at different sizes, have to use links instead):

http://imageshack.us/a/img14/4325/screensize1.jpg

And a screenshot at the higher resolution:

http://imageshack.us/a/img541/455/screensize2.jpg

The CGs are easy enough to replace because I have them in big-size anyway, but there are a few times where I made use of the fact that I had large graphics to do special effects, which will now have to either be dropped or be fuzzy. Same thing for the couple of times I used the sprites at source resolution for closeups. And since I wasn't coding with rescaling in mind in the first place, there's a lot of hard-coded silliness that will have to be adjusted by hand.

On the bright side, I'm planning to make this CD-only, so I can completely ignore things like filesize. The original version will be on the disc as well, so if someone's computer does not like the resolution I'm using, they can always fall back to the old one.

But we'll see how it goes.

2 comments:

Milki said...

Hrrm. I'd really like a high-res version... but CD-only is a bummer, as international shipping is usually pretty pricey.

Would the download traffic be the matter or why would you only release it on CD?

Whiner said...

Download size is one problem, especially if I needed to make a demo version of the Big.

Another is the tangled complications of selling two versions of the same thing, which can confuse people... and the large version would be more likely to have issues running on some computers, so if it were sold by itself I can see tech support problems and refund requests happening.

It feels more polite to me, overall, to say "Here's the higher-priced edition, it comes in a nice box with both versions for all three operating systems, all at once"

And it means a certain pirate can't get his hands on it. :)

But nothing's certain yet. I'm nowhere near having the high-res version even finished!