Image Resolution and Readable Fonts

[Jabbage]

Hi all! I've been making my game at 320 x 180, which has been great for having a retro look and enabling me to produce backgrounds and animations fairly quickly. I spent a while finding pixel fonts that I think are comparatively easy to read.

I've run into an issue when sharing my game with play testers, though, where folks with dyslexia are finding it really tough going. Ideally they would need much higher resolution fonts with antialiasing.

Has anyone else run into this problem, and do you have a solution?
Would I have to increase the resolution of the game and then manually resize all the artwork? 

[Khris]

I've seen lots of (hires) games with absolutely unreadable fonts, many of them big budget titles. This is not uncommon at all. I'd say you absolutely do not have to increase the resolution, just pick a more readable font (or make it a game option).

Edit:
It's about this game I guess?


Edit 2:
To be clear: by "more readable" I simply mean "bigger". There should be enough available space to pick a larger font where characters are more easily distinguishable.

[Snarky]

Has anyone else run into this problem

There are always a few people who complain about low-res text now and then, but I can't remember that anyone has ever before brought up a claim that dyslexics find normal pixel fonts especially difficult to read, no. Of course, if people are finding the text hard or unpleasant to read, it doesn't really matter if that's because of dyslexia or not. But it's difficult to tell how big of a problem it is—if people are complaining because of genuine difficulty or just personal preference.

I'd definitely suggest making a few mockups to test out the alternatives before going ahead and redoing the game to address this complaint. As Khris says, it might be that you can solve it just by picking a different, perhaps larger, pixel font. (If you do decide to offer a higher-resolution font, you could also make it a game setting, so players can choose which font/style they prefer.)

Would I have to increase the resolution of the game and then manually resize all the artwork? 

To get higher-resolution text display you would definitely have to increase the game resolution, yes. But you may not have to resize all the artwork: it might be possible to set up a camera and viewport to scale up all the rooms to, say, x4 scale (1280x720).

This will affect things that "live" in the rooms: objects and characters (and walkbehinds and hotspots and all that), but I don't think it should affect GUIs or Overlays. And since speech boxes are displayed as overlays, I assume they will not be upscaled, thus allowing you to display higher-resolution text. (Of course, it means you'll have to upscale the dialog portraits.) But I haven't actually tested it.

[Jabbage]

I've seen lots of (hires) games with absolutely unreadable fonts, many of them big budget titles. This is not uncommon at all. I'd say you absolutely do not have to increase the resolution, just pick a more readable font (or make it a game option).

Edit:
It's about this game I guess?


Edit 2:
To be clear: by "more readable" I simply mean "bigger". There should be enough available space to pick a larger font where characters are more easily distinguishable.

Yes, sorry I guess an example screenshot would be helpful! Of course that screenshot is resized so the anti-aliasing has kicked in, and so it's smoother than it looks in the game.

By larger are we talking about the font size?
I feel like it's already quite large in terms of how much space it takes up on the screen (much larger than Secret of Monkey Island-style dialogue appearing above the characters, for example) and the problem people are having is more to do with the lack of smooth lines inherent to pixel fonts but I can certainly do some experimenting.

I guess if I'm going larger I'd have to pick a larger pixel fone or switch to a TTF?

Has anyone else run into this problem

There are always a few people who complain about low-res text now and then, but I can't remember that anyone has ever before brought up a claim that dyslexics find normal pixel fonts especially difficult to read, no. Of course, if people are finding the text hard or unpleasant to read, it doesn't really matter if that's because of dyslexia or not. But it's difficult to tell how big of a problem it is—if people are complaining because of genuine difficulty or just personal preference.

It's true that part of the problem with making any content accessible is that everyone's needs are silghtly different, but I've had three or four people independently get in touch about it, which suggests to me that something needs tweaking.


Thank you for all the advice, it's given me some things to try!

[Khris]

I feel like it's already quite large in terms of how much space it takes up on the screen (much larger than Secret of Monkey Island-style dialogue appearing above the characters, for example)

Not sure if that's true tbh:

It looks like it's about the same size; the main difference is that the MI font has 2 pixel wide vertical lines.

and the problem people are having is more to do with the lack of smooth lines inherent to pixel fonts but I can certainly do some experimenting.

I guess if I'm going larger I'd have to pick a larger pixel fone or switch to a TTF?

You can only get smooth lines if you use a TTF and enable fonts anti-aliasing. You'll have to pick a font size of 12 or greater though or the AA won't make much of a difference when it comes to readability. So I'd definitely make this optional in-game.

[Crimson Wizard]

To get higher-resolution text display you would definitely have to increase the game resolution, yes. But you may not have to resize all the artwork: it might be possible to set up a camera and viewport to scale up all the rooms to, say, x4 scale (1280x720).

This will affect things that "live" in the rooms: objects and characters (and walkbehinds and hotspots and all that), but I don't think it should affect GUIs or Overlays. And since speech boxes are displayed as overlays, I assume they will not be upscaled, thus allowing you to display higher-resolution text. (Of course, it means you'll have to upscale the dialog portraits.) But I haven't actually tested it.

This is actually quite true and doable. I have seen a person using this effect in a game they were making (I forgot the production title, but the post is somewhere in the "tech questions", about 1.5-2 years ago).

There's also a "Cameras Tech Demo" game I made which demonstrates this kind of combination: the game is 1280x720, but some of the rooms and gfx are 320x200, but displayed zoomed-up in a room viewport, while GUI and fonts are hi-res.

I believe you can certainly do a game like that. This should not increase the size of resources on disk or performance, as you will still be using low-res assets, which are scaled using gfx card operations at the runtime.
One "limiting" consequence of this though is that the minimal display resolution will be locked to the GUI/font resolution; so choosing e.g. 1920x1080 may not be the best idea.

In perspective, AGS could properly support rendering fonts in a higher resolution regardless of the game's native screen size. This is similar to how the character sprites can be rendered at higher res if "Render sprites at screen resolution" option is turned on in the game setup, This was not implemented yet, because it was more difficult to separate texts from other parts of the game, because of how engine is coded; but I believe it should be doable at some point in future.