takua108

Hey all,

After years, I'm getting back into making simple dumb games with Game Maker, now that I have GM:S, and I have a question:

I'm making a game. I want it to be 320x240, but in the Windows, OSX, and HTML5 versions (the main versions I'm working on now), scale that times two to 640x480, because 320x240 is obviously super small.

However, I want to maintain the pixelly look of 320x240, and basically just double the pixels. Also, my game uses a view to move the "camera" around.

(Also, I have "interpolate colors between pixels" turned off.)

Initially, I just made the view I'm using be 320x240, and port it to the screen at 640x480, but this led to a couple of problems. I'm using particles in my game, using the built-in "explosion" particle, and those would have "smaller pixels" than everything else, because they were being drawn at 640x480 instead of 320x240. The same problem went for text I was drawing on the screen; it was being drawn at 640x480 instead of 320x240, and thus looked sharper than it should've.

Next, I tried changing the "port on screen" of the view to just 320x240, and using window_set_size(640, 480). This led to my game looking distorted and weird. The individual characters of text drawn with draw_text would be weirdly misaligned, sprites would sometimes be stretched weirdly either horizontally or vertically by a single pixel, and other weird stuff.

After disabling that, I tried just putting the game in fullscreen, and found this to be basically exactly what I wanted. Everything was drawn correctly and looked just fine... except that I want this game to be able to be played in a window, or on a browser page.

Is there something super obvious that I'm missing here? I'm looking at using surfaces right now, but I've never used them before; is that maybe a possible solution?

Thanks in advance.