Resizing pixel art

offtheradar

I am making a game with pixel art style graphics. Everything has been made to look good at 480x320, which is alright until GameSalad scales the images for higher resolution displays and everything looks blurry.

Is it possible to turn this anti-aliasing effect off? Or is my only option to resize the graphics in my paint application, and then reimport them? Can I have multiple images at different sizes for each actor?

One other question that is not directly related: is the inner rectangle on the scene editor used to indicate what part of the screen will be displayed regardless of resolution? So all game play should occur within that area?

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions.

jay2dx

I've often wondered this too, so I mainly design a universal game on iPad and let game salad scale it down rather than up!

Spalding004

You will have to scale the graphics up. In photoshop, this would mean scaling it up with "preserve hard edges" checked. If you need a program similar to photoshop, I would recommend GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) which is free at gimp.org.

You will only need one image (at the larger resolution) for any particular actor. If you need one smaller, just change the dimensions of the actor itself (being sure to keep the same ratio).

The nice thing about reimporting is that the new images just replace the old one, so like magic your project will look better at the higher res (after you import, of course).

offtheradar

Thanks Spalding004, I'll scale up and re-import.

Can anyone help with my second question, what the inner rectangle is used for on the stage/scene editor?

RThurman

@offtheradar said:
Thanks Spalding004, I'll scale up and re-import.

Can anyone help with my second question, what the inner rectangle is used for on the stage/scene editor?

Those are camera controls. Take a look at this explanation:

https://help.gamesalad.com/hc/en-us/articles/202271418-1-4-Using-Scenes-in-GameSalad

offtheradar

@RThurman said:
Those are camera controls. Take a look at this explanation:

Cool, thanks. So when designing a scene on the stage, how do we know what areas will be cut off when the scene is scaled to different resolutions that are not exactly the same shape (would be more of a concern for Android dev I guess)?

jay2dx

Well you could make your own image template and make it an actor, on the image just draw out the dimensions of an iPad screen the. The boundary of the iPhone screen inside it, just turn it on and off in the scene editor to check, that's what I do

offtheradar

@jay2dx said:
Well you could make your own image template and make it an actor, on the image just draw out the dimensions of an iPad screen the. The boundary of the iPhone screen inside it, just turn it on and off in the scene editor to check, that's what I do

Thanks jay2dx, what do you align the boundary images to? Do you center them in the screen, align to top left etc?

Ed_Perkin

Scale up in photoshop