heartmachinez:

Some clarity on a topic that came up

A post on Neogaf brought up comments I made in an interview a little while back, wherein I was asked if Hyper Light was running at 1080p. I answered that it was intentionally at a low resolution, so 1080p was silly to even ask about for 2d games (meaning games like ours with a specific pixel aesthetic, since that was the topic). The interviewer understood the points and laughed. The comments were misinterpreted online, and a whole thread of comments came to life.

To help explain our methods, and the response to the resolution question, I thought some technical detail would be helpful.

Our game is rendered to a surface in our engine at 480x270 (270p, our virtual resolution, a 16:9 aspect ratio), which the engine then scales to the native resolution of the display (1080p, being the most common resolution of TVs now, is our typical display resolution). 

So the game is rendered in engine at a fairly low resolution, and will scale and output to your native resolution (likely 1080p), while retainingthe same sharp big pixel look - no fuzzy rubbish like YouTube videos at lower resolutions, a false equivalency that popped up. (Online videos have heavy compression and poor scaling for lower resolution content.) 

A good example of a tiny Mega Man sprite scaled up was posted in that thread:

There are some tricks for other common sub-1080p resolutions for perfect 1:1 scaling, but that can be saved for another time.

Ultimately nothing mysterious about our method of displaying a low resolution game on a high resolution display, and a common practice among other pixel style games such as Nuclear Throne and Shovel Knight (with an excellent write up of their tech living here: http://ubm.io/1mlXLP2).

On frames

Another item that popped up is frame rate: the Preview build was very hungry for memory and CPU cycles; it takes a multi-core machine with a good chunk of RAM to run it smoothly, so some experienced inconsistent frame rates. This was due to it being an unoptimized chunk of code, the nature of early builds.

Part of the point of the preview release was to see how it would run on a wide variety of machines, even in this intense form. Hardcore optimization will begin much closer to release, since we will have all of the game systems and components (the AI, layers of effects for shaders and particles, sets of enemies, music and sound) locked in.

That’s about it for now! I’m more than happy to further discussion on any of this, so feel free to email us.