I recently added a profile of my forthcoming game, Pawns for iPhone, to the website IndieDB. As I was generating screenshots I found to my dismay that I could not generate high-resolution screenshots of games in progress. The iPhone version of Pawns is currently hard-wired for iPhones in landscape mode.

I had planned all along to look into iPad and “retina display” support later on, possibly after the first release for iPhone. It never occurred to me that I would find those higher resolutions useful myself. Oops.

Even more embarrassing, the original version of Pawns supported many screen resolutions. It’s something I lost as I tuned the game for iPhone.

The original version used Unity’s GUI objects, which are always sized proportionally to the screen. To make the graphics crisper on the iPhone I had converted much of it over to UnityGUI. But pixel-correct textures come at the cost of needing to draw gui elements at every resolution that you will need them. The plan is to rebuild my gui elements at a much higher resolution and let them be scaled pretty much wherever they are used. Hopefully the result won’t be too blurry.