Petit Pixels

Low Res Project Settings in Godot 4.3

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This project is a small prototype made for exploring some options that Godot provides for setting up games with retro pixel art aesthetics.

Only one scene was created, being it the place where are all the desired characteristics were tested. Such scene is located in the scenes folder with the name main.tscn.

Further in this README are noted the steps followed to be able to acquire the desired appearence rendering-wise.

Project Settings

Initial width and height

The initial width (display/window/size/viewport_width) and height (display/window/size/viewport_height) of the project should be set to the desired low resolution values. In the case of this project they are 256 by 144 pixels.

Width and height override

The width (display/window/size/window_width_override) and height (display/window/size/window_height_override) override values should correspond to the size of the game viewport when scaled.

Such properties must be set so that the project can be scaled and not shown as a tiny window, like low resolution textures usually are displayed in high resolution monitors.

In this project those values are 1280 by 720 pixels.

Scretch mode

The scretch mode (display/window/stretch/mode) should be set to "canvas_items" or "viewport" so that the game isn't distorted when scaled up or down. In this project the "canvas_items" value was chosen, but apparently the "viewport" value gives the same result.

Texture filter

For pixel art aesthetics, the texture rendering method (rendering/textures/canvas_textures/default_texture_filter) must be set to the "nearest" value, instead of the default "linear" value, which makes scaled textures look blurry.

Snap textures to pixel

If it's desired that the textures shouldn't be able to be displayed in subpixel positions, either the rendering/2d/snap/snap_2d_vertices_to_pixel or the rendering/2d/snap/snap_2d_transforms_to_pixel property should be marked as true (apparently, only one of them should be marked, according to their hover documentation).

If the textures of Control nodes should also behave that way, the gui/common/snap_controls_to_pixels property should be kept true, as it is by default.

Note that making these adjustments may make the textures jitter when moving, because they will only be rendered in full pixels, and that might not look good, depending on your intention. Also, that may cause problems when using a moving camera.

To avoid those problems, in this project it was chosen to leave those settings unactiveted. That means the rendering/2d/snap/snap_2d_vertices_to_pixel, rendering/2d/snap/snap_2d_transforms_to_pixel and gui/common/snap_controls_to_pixels properties were set to false.

Disclaimer

This project's sprites were taken from The Spriters Resource. Originally they are from Nintendo games such as the GBC Pokémon and Zelda titles.