I'd like to to gauge how others go about selecting a starting resolution for a game?

This excludes pixel art games, as you can easily go for 320 x 240 and scale up with no interpolation.

Also largely excludes 3D games where the main actors are models, and are therefore mathematical. Textures are a factor but not really what I'm asking.

I'm talking mainly about 2D games where a resolution must chosen and the art work is based on that resolution. You can scale up and down in realtime of course, to suit a different screen resolution, (depending on your engine) and the scaling would do a pretty decent job.

You could say go, for something like 4k, as it would cover all bases, yet memory constraints and distribution size all come into play. As does strain on the engine having to heavily re-scale down.

Interested to hear thoughts on how others have chosen their starting resolution to begin work their art assets.

Imo, if you dont choose my default desktop resolution and let me play borderless windowed, I will stop playing your game.

I'd be mighty sorry to lose you @JTippetts, but that's not what I'm asking. Regardless of resolution, fullscreen mode, or borderless window would always be available.

A 2D game can either shift into a true mode or be scaled up.

And either way, every developer needs to start... somewhere, in order to start producing non-pixelart 2D artwork.

That thought process is what interests me.

Okay, I sorta misunderstood what you were asking. A good place to start might be the steam hardware survey, from which you can learn that the most common desktop resolution is 1920x1080. That seems like a pretty safe bet. Make your artwork look good on that and that should cover most cases, then you can scale for the outliers.

Thanks, @JTippetts that's good advice, yes and perhaps the 1080 resolution is a better one to start with than what I have been choosing in the past.

I agree with @JTippetts maybe even start off borderless full screen for those of us with multiple monitors, or detect multiple monitors, otherwise full screen to start?

Hi CrazyCdn. Again you're talking about the end result of a game on your monitor.

I'm asking about that conversation you have with your designer right at the very start, the pre-production stage.

This is where pixel width and height is chosen for the "canvas". Once into production, designs for sprites can be difficult to redraw if there's a change of mind on the pixel dimensions. Choosing the size at the start is a serious consideration.