Anyways that leaves us with an important turning point that I believe we should have decided a week or two ago. That is our screen resolution.
Since we can scale images this should make the game incredibly easier to design. Instead of trying to keep in mind multiple resolutions, we can just aim for one resolution and scale the screen surface just before we flip the surface buffer to the screen. I propose we design the game for a 1024x768 screen resolution. I think it looked the best in my map demo program and it gives us plenty of room to work, while not requiring the user to have an uber-l33t monitor. I think we should also allow for scalable resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, and 1200x1024 although we should highly recommend the default resolution (I don't know if there is going to be a visible level of distortion or not in the scaled images, and 640x480 can get pretty damn hard to see). If anyone has objects to the proposed default res, let your voices be heard.
Now with this resolution we are going to need to decide on a few things. Namely:
1) Format of the tiled environment
-and-
2) Format of the battle environment
-and-
3) Format of the main menu (not the boot screen) environment
Since only #1 applies to this thread I'll talk a little about it here. Well nothing fancy. Character is in the center of the screen, there are tiles, and there are sprites walking about. When a dialogue occurs, a dialogue box is drawn at the top or bottom (I'm leaning towards bottom) of the screen. Inside the box (which will be slightly translucent) if a main character speaks his/her emoticon will pop up in the left of the box. Either the box background will be dark and the text will be light, or the box will be light and the text will be dark (former is probably better I think, but I'll have to see it first). As for the exact dimensions (in pixels) of everything I have no idea. Maybe take up the bottom 100 pixels or so for the text dialogue? I'd like 3-4 lines of text to fit in the box as well.
