Map size for iOS & Android

Questions
1

Hello,

I’ve been trying to figure out a good map size that will work on the latest iOS and android devices. At the very least I want it to be compatible with the iPhone 6+ and iPad Air with retina display and as many android devices that is within similar boundaries (I’m not an android user but still). I’m designing the game so that it is top-down and uses the landscape mode with an orthogonal map. I’ve been asking around on different forums about what would work with pixel art (16x16 pixels) but I can’t seem to get a straight answer. I’m still confused about the maths involved in working this out which doesn’t help. If someone could give me a short concise answer looking at my target audience that would be fantastic. I’m just looking for a rough idea because I’m still working on the tiles etc and I haven’t had a chance to look into the code yet to test it out myself. I’m totally new at this.

2

Hi,

well I think this heavily depends on your game i think… I would simply try it out and see how it looks at different zoom levels / map sizes…

We do a pixel art mmorpg. We simply zoom the view by a factor if the resolution is too high… We zoom in if the width or height goes over 959. So on some devices we zoom in like 3 times. We do that to stress the pixel feeling.

But well… just try what works the best for you.

3

OK but are there any general sizes that people usually go for? like 50x50 pixels, 100x100 pixels? I just need a basic idea… cos don’t you handle stuff like camera view after you have a completed map to work with? And isn’t that done on the engine not through tiled?

4

There is no one size fits all. Engines will commonly work with any size you want.

Here are some screenshots of the game @Ablu is referring to, which I am also involved in when time allows:

http://www.sourceoftales.org/screenshots.html

We picked a common resolution for tile graphics: 32x32 (which was anyway given because of the graphics set we went for). Then, because we wanted the pixel look, we chose a low target resolution of 640x360. We picked this because it would neatly scale up to currently common resolutions: 1280x720 (with x2 scale) and 1920x1080 (with x3 scale). The UI layout is a little flexible so that it can adjust to small variations, but it’s not flexible enough to work in portrait mode at the moment.

Usually, you decide on these these things before you start building your maps, because it defines for example how much and how far the player can see. But as Ablu said, you should really just try things out and see what works best in your case.

5

Thanks, I’ll have a look.