Welcome to the April devlog for Helms of Fury!  This month we worked on scaling our game to multiple resolutions, the character select screen, start screen, loading screen, and customized controls.

Game Resolutions

One of the things we wanted to make sure we finished this month was scaling our game to multiple resolutions, all the way up to 4k.  Being a pixel art game, just stretching the game would distort the look at certain resolutions, so one way to solve this is by adding black borders to fill the space.  We aren't a fan of black borders tho, so we decided to try adjusting the viewport when needed.

As an example, 1920x1080 is a pixel perfect resolution for our game, but if you have a 1680x1050 monitor, the viewport would be updated to be about 10% smaller, so you won't see quite as far in the game world, but the game would still fill your whole resolution, with no black bars.  Similarly, 1440x810 is a pixel perfect resolution, so if you play at 1366x768, 1280x800 or 1280x720, it would be around the same 5-10%.  In our play testing on a few different resolutions these all felt good, and we liked it much more than black bars.  (tho if you have an ultrawide resolution such as 2560x1080, black bars would still be needed, as that would let you see too far in the game world)

Char Select

This month we also took a few attempts at designing a fun character select screen.  Attached is one version we've been working on, which feels fast and fun to select chars, and includes base stats on each knight to help them feel a bit more unique.

Start, Loading, Controls

Along with the Character Select screen, we also worked on the Start Screen and Loading Screen.  And to ensure the game plays well for everyone, we also began work on a Controls screen, letting you set custom key bindings for buttons, volume sliders to manage audio, and graphical options such as resolution, fullscreen or windowed, vysnc, brightness, contrast, and saturation.

That's all for this update, cya next month!