Originally published September 2, 2022.
Today’s issue is all about the size!
(Note: I used speech recognition to write this, so the wording might be a little off in some spots.)
Hello everyone! As we count down to the release of Soundless Final Verse, I will be providing you with periodic issues about the development. For today’s issue, we will be going over the new resolution.
The original Soundless was very small in order to mimic old visual novels that were on equally small screens of 4:3 ratio. However, as computer resolutions become larger, Soundless now really is the size of an ant on the average PC. You may remember that it previously had a warning that you should uninstall if the window was the size of an ant. Well, just about everybody would have to uninstall these days, unless you still have a really old monitor or use a smaller laptop. Even I would have to uninstall my own game.
So for the port, I decided to make the screen size double of what it was previously. At first I was a little reluctant to do this because I would have to upscale the assets. They were all drawn at the window’s exact size; I didn’t know it was good practice to draw double the window size yet. I was concerned that if they were upscaled, they wouldn’t look good anymore. So I tested how they would look using waifu2x. As it turns out, they look just fine when upscaled with the neural network that waifu2x uses.
Now you can choose from three different resolutions, as well as go full screen. There is 1280 x 960, 800 x 600, or even the original 640 x 480.
Another neat thing about the new resolution is that there is no need to include font size settings, because the font is already very large. I feel that this font size will suit most use cases when combined with full screen.
One more thing that I had to do when increasing the screen size was rebuild all the old menus, such as the save menu and the options menu. But this is a topic that deserves its own issue, so I will leave it for next time.
Soundless Final Verse’s release will be announced on all of our social media channels, so feel free to follow us anywhere or even join the Discord for an @everyone ping when it comes out!