I've always wondered, when developing a game, there are obviously going to be a lot of different people with different specs and such. This is why you usually provide players with graphical settings so they can adjust it to suit there machines.

Now, I haven't made anything myself as of yet, but currently working on clones of games while adding to my own ideas and documents. How does resolution actually work? When you display a 2D game, you have all of the sprites in specific positions, when you increase the resolution of a game, those positions are going to change and aren't the sizes of the sprites going to change as well?? I have only messed with viewports in SFML before, so not 100% sure on how it all works, or even if that's the right thing to use.

Do you develop your games based around 1920 x 1080, or do you have to reset the positions and sizes of sprites, collision detection, etc. around different resolutions??

The keywords are:

* multi-resolution images,

* resolution independent co-ordinate system,

* letter/pillow boxes.

Sprites can be available at different resolutions, and the set of sprites that best matches the given platform is chosen at the beginning. Also, don't think that 1:1 pixel mapping between the sprite and the screen is set in stone.

Regarding to sprite placement, collision detection and such: Pixels co-ordinates are bad for these purposes. Instead, use a virtual and resolution independent co-ordinate system. Map this to pixels lately during rendering.

Use window relative co-ordinates for the placement of GUI elements. E.g. the screen height is fine for normalization, so that the screen relative co-ordinates range from 0 to the aspect ratio horizontally and from 0 to 1 vertically. Further, allow for anchoring, so that GUI elements can be related e.g. to the left / center / right window border horizontally, and to the top / center / bottom border vertically. I personally do this by having 2 values per dimension, one that specifies the anchor position relative to the width or height, resp., and another that specifies an offset in relative co-ordinates (this time relative to the height for both dimensions), so that the anchor can be specified anywhere in the window.

The aspect ratio is the only real problem, if your playground is not allowed to be more visible for one player than for another due to competition reasons. In such a case you should work with pillar/letter boxes. Those don't need to be of ugly black but can be filled with some nice background.