Designing for Multiple Resolutions

[Kalagaraz]

So I'm curious what is the best way to design a game to work on as many devices as possible (Phones, Tablets, Etc...)? And what are the best sizes for SD and HD images? Should I have a 3rd set for tablets with really big screens? ( For example should I have 256x256, 512x512, and 1024x1024?) or start smaller like 128x128 etc.. etc...?

I'm not really a big fan of "letter boxing" as that is just wasted space, but I would like my game to appear almost identical on all devices.

I'm really confused on how to setup 2D Toolkit to work for as many devices as possible. If anyone can clarify I'd appreciate it.

EDIT: Okay from reading various forum posts it seems the best workflow is to design the game around the lowest supported resolution. What is the best target resolutions these days?

Thanks,
Kalagaraz

[unikronsoftware]

"What is the best target resolutions these days?"
Depends on what you're working with. What are you targeting, realistically? Apart from designing specifically for each interface, everything else is going to be different levels of compromise.

Starting with the lowest resolution is the best option for the highest quality, as scaling up won't reduce quality in most cases - you're displaying MORE information after all, but scaling down will.

If you don't want letterboxing, you will have to either:
1. Design your game to work with more or less information on different devices, i.e. you will see more or less of the scene.
2. Scale to fit - obviously losing quality because of non uniform scales. But you will show the same data on all devices... I'm not a huge fan of this, I think it looks horrible.

Stick to a max of 2048 atlases if you want to support the largest number of devices.

[Kalagaraz]

"What is the best target resolutions these days?"
Depends on what you're working with. What are you targeting, realistically? Apart from designing specifically for each interface, everything else is going to be different levels of compromise.

Starting with the lowest resolution is the best option for the highest quality, as scaling up won't reduce quality in most cases - you're displaying MORE information after all, but scaling down will.

If you don't want letterboxing, you will have to either:
1. Design your game to work with more or less information on different devices, i.e. you will see more or less of the scene.
2. Scale to fit - obviously losing quality because of non uniform scales. But you will show the same data on all devices... I'm not a huge fan of this, I think it looks horrible.

Stick to a max of 2048 atlases if you want to support the largest number of devices.

So what image sizes do you generally classify as 1x,2x, and 4x?

I'm doing a puzzle game, so what I was thinking I could have my artist just design a slightly different game board for each aspect ratio, and keep the actual content of the game centered. That way game looks like it was specifically made for whatever device. But I'm not sure what the most common resolutions / aspect ratios I should be targeting are.  What do most of the "top paid" games do on android market?

Thanks

[unikronsoftware]

Image sizes depend entirely on what you're representing. You want to probably consider resolution instead of image sizes.

If its a puzzle game, your approach there is probably the best way to go about it. There is a list of Android device resolutions here:
http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html#testing
Perhaps someone else could comment about commonly used resolutions, etc.

Or you could design your gfx to work with any resolution - just plan for it and you should be able to do it.