Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
low you to resample the artwork on the fly to an off-screen canvas, but this will double the
memory usage of your app and slow down the load time of your game.
If you don't anticipate changing the scale size of your game based on different resolutions,
then it may make more sense to output everything at the correct scale factor ahead of time.
This is especially important on slower devices. When it comes to getting the best perform-
ance out of Windows 8 games, you have to build for the lowest common denominator. If you
are forced to resample your artwork on the fly, I suggest caching the generated art to the
player's computer and only regenerating it on major resolution changes, or when the app
loads up for the first time.
Designing for Multiple Resolutions
While this section may not help you if you already have a completed game, I still want to
spend a little time talking about some great ways to better handle multiple resolutions with
forward-thinking design. There are a lot of simple tricks you can implement to help accom-
modate multiple resolutions. Most of the problems usually come up with the game's UI. The
first thing I do is open up my design tool and map out a few resolutions to see how they will
look in my game. This is a similar technique to what I used to do in video editing to find a
“safe zone” where the TV's edges would clip text or video. Here is an example from my
game Super Paper Monster Smasher.
