Hello,

I want to make a maze game, with all the labyrinths and stuff and I don't know what will be the recommended size for my tiles. It will be 800x600.

Do you have any suggestions? I would use 32x32 but I think that will be too much.. What about if I make may game tiles 53,3x53,3?

I think that perhaps a better question is what's so great about 800x600?

No modern display supports that resolution natively, nor do many displays support an even multiple of that resolution--so when displaying on most displays, you will either have significant letter-boxing or significant scaling artifacts--both of which are undesirable.

If you want 800x600 in order to have a retro-esque, pixelated presentation, then I would submit that 800x600 probably isn't going far enough. 640x480 would be nicer (or 800x480 for wide-screen) with larger pixels and cleaner scaling to common display sizes (with minimal letterboxing). But my actual preference would be 480x360 (or 640x360 for wide-screen) which scales perfectly well to 720p and 1080p, and with very little letterboxing to 1366x768 (far and away the most common PC resolution, due to laptop displays) -- that would give you near-perfect scaling to 95% of displays, and acceptable scaling to 4 of the other 5 percent -- only a handful of uncommon, oddball display resolutions don't work great.

You could make your tile sizes any size you want. They can be 20x40, or 57x31, if you so desired.

...but I would not recommend using partial pixels for tile sizes (so I'd rather go 53x53 than 53.3x53.3).

I would suggest setting up something quick that allows you to test layouts and such, based on your game.

Mechanics such as combat (range?), movement speed, size of world, detail level preferred, etc., all influence what kind of tile size you should go for.

Testing to find something suitable will probably give you the answers you need.

I've had an itch to write an article for the site, and this is actually one of the topics I've considered. There's been a number of threads and at least one recent article written (about the nuts and bolts of scaling, rather than choosing a resolution). So it seems clear that this a topic on people's minds.

It'd would probably be called something like "Choosing a resolution for your retro game" -- and it would cite statistics about what the popular resolutions are on various devices, and offer guidelines and specific examples for choosing an optimal resolution. Also it would discuss various approaches to scaling, and have mockup images to show what the letterboxing would look like or what scaling artifacts might be introduced.

Without co-opting the thread, who here would be interested in a thorough treatment of that topic? Vote with a reply or +1, or PM me if you have any thoughts on what you'd like to see.

Usually, tiles were sized 2^(k) due to some rendering optimizations. Today, rendering tiles with arbitrary sizes got way faster, so no need to keep them as a potency of two anymore.
Still, tiles are usually in pixels and you can't draw a fraction of a pixel, so a tile of 53.3 wouldn't work, unless you are not thinking in pixels. This would mean you are abstracting the tile size from its real size, and in this case you can choose any size you want, even negatives, but it would make your code unnecessarily complex.

I'd say stick to whole numbers and, as Servant Of The Lord said, bigger is sometimes better. They can be more detailed and you'll have less tiles to draw per frame.
Still, you can always use small sizes and add detail in 2x2, 1x3 compound tile blocks that are supposed to always be used together.

Just try to KISS.

One other issue to consider is how you are doing collision detection between your player and the walls of your maze. If you are going to use non-passable tiles for walls, then having larger tile sizes will mean that you can't have narrow walls between passages.

Or you'd need to separate the collision from the tiled map itself.
But I always liked to tie both up, makes things easier. Separating is usually overengineering, unless there are special needs that makes this approach a necessity.

If you need to decouple the collision data from the tiled grid, you should search vectorial collision data, or bitmasks if your map changes collision configuration (think of Worms); I personally don't like bitmasks for this type of collision.

I think that perhaps a better question is what's so great about 800x600?

No modern display supports that resolution natively, nor do many displays support an even multiple of that resolution--so when displaying on most displays, you will either have significant letter-boxing or significant scaling artifacts--both of which are undesirable.

If you want 800x600 in order to have a retro-esque, pixelated presentation, then I would submit that 800x600 probably isn't going far enough. 640x480 would be nicer (or 800x480 for wide-screen) with larger pixels and cleaner scaling to common display sizes (with minimal letterboxing). But my actual preference would be 480x360 (or 640x360 for wide-screen) which scales perfectly well to 720p and 1080p, and with very little letterboxing to 1366x768 (far and away the most common PC resolution, due to laptop displays) -- that would give you near-perfect scaling to 95% of displays, and acceptable scaling to 4 of the other 5 percent -- only a handful of uncommon, oddball display resolutions don't work great.

800x600 seems to be the best resolution for me. It will be in a window so I do not concern about scaling/letterboxing and stuff like that.

I've had an itch to write an article for the site, and this is actually one of the topics I've considered. There's been a number of threads and at least one recent article written (about the nuts and bolts of scaling, rather than choosing a resolution). So it seems clear that this a topic on people's minds.

It'd would probably be called something like "Choosing a resolution for your retro game" -- and it would cite statistics about what the popular resolutions are on various devices, and offer guidelines and specific examples for choosing an optimal resolution. Also it would discuss various approaches to scaling, and have mockup images to show what the letterboxing would look like or what scaling artifacts might be introduced.

Without co-opting the thread, who here would be interested in a thorough treatment of that topic? Vote with a reply or +1, or PM me if you have any thoughts on what you'd like to see.

I am really interested in a topic like that. You definetly should write it.

One other issue to consider is how you are doing collision detection between your player and the walls of your maze. If you are going to use non-passable tiles for walls, then having larger tile sizes will mean that you can't have narrow walls between passages.

Thats what I think too. Because I want the game to increase in dificulty, I can't do that if my tiles are very big because that will mean I can't design narrow paths.

As a conclusion, I think I will stick with 32x32 tiles because will give me more liberty when designing the mazes. There will gonna be just walls tiles so, too much details won't be needed (the game will be made just for educational purposes and not for commercial ones).

Thank you everyone for your feedback.