What Resolution To Use for Pixel Art

I'm by no means an expert, but here are the considerations I made when choosing what resolution to work with.

What did other games do?

  • Hyper Light Drifter renders to a 480 x 270 which is scaled up to the resolution of your display. [1]
  • Eastward appears to be 480 x 270. [2] (I know, I know, Reddit)

Are you emulating an old system?

  • SNES has a resolution of 256 x 224. [3]

Scaling up to HD

This one's simple - if you maintain a 16:9 aspect ratio and your resolution width and height cleanly divide into 1920 x 1080, you can scale to HD trivially. Consider 480 x 270. We've got:

  • 1920 / 480 = 4
  • 1080 / 270 = 4

so you can scale your media x4 to fill the screen. If your ratio isn't 16:9, you can still fill the screen with either vertical or horizontal black bars to make up the difference.

If your resolution does not allow for integer scaling to HD, you might consider the following:

  1. Scale up using the largest integer you can that does not create an image beyond 1920 x 1080, then pad with black bars.
  2. Scale just the art up cleanly with an integer, but keep the view constrained. I don't currently know how to do this.

But what about 4K TVs and monitors? fuck 'em

Are you going to print it?

This one's trickier, but it helps to think about what you want to achieve. You want to reverse into your image size, if you can, or you'll need to crop or edit the finished image. Generally, you want to scale your image up before you sent it to the printer, because the algorithm used by the printer will not always result in crisp edges.

  1. How big will your printed material be? Is it a post card, a letter, a poster?
  2. Will you print full bleed (artwork to the edges, no margin) or will you have a margin?
  3. What printer resolution (dots per inch) are you printing at? 300 DPI is common.

If you're printing an SNES sized image at 300 DPI and, your entire image will be less than an inch!

What I use

The real reason I wrote this article - so I don't have to think about it every time that I take a break from doing low res or pixel art. Just use 480 x 270! How can I pretend that I know better than the devs behind Eastward or Hyper Light Drifter?

References & Notes

  1. https://nightmargin.tumblr.com/post/102886823891/on-resolution ↩︎

  2. https://www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/comments/p5k9g1/what_is_the_pixel_resolution_of_eastward/ ↩︎

  3. https://blog.unity.com/games/2d-pixel-perfect-how-to-set-up-your-unity-project-for-retro-16-bit-games ↩︎

Created: 2024-06-15