Life Has Many Aspects... And Too Many Aspect Ratios

​We truly are blessed to have screens of different shapes and sizes surrounding us in our everyday lives. You've got small, compact screens that fit in your pocket, and you also have big, expansive screens that light up your living room. This is all great and dandy, but if you're a game designer aiming to release your game on multiple platforms, you have to remember that not all screens are created equal. In this blog post and a few future ones, I will talk about a few problems I encountered while developing a mobile game that you should plan for. Today's topic will be...

Aspect Ratios

The size of a screen isn't as big of a problem as its aspect ratio. If you don't know what that is, its the ratio of a screen's width to its height, written like this width:height​. Luckily, there are some aspect ratios that are fairly standard nowadays, such as 16:9 and 4:3, but recently, phone manufacturers are pushing wider screens with dumb ratios like 19.5:9.

Here are comparison shots from a game I worked on:

16:9

4:3

19.5:9

As you can see, the 4:3 ratio is obscuring some information, while the 19.5:9 ratio possibly shows more than it needs to. The solution to these kinds of problems is really your design choice. If your game must absolutely run at one ratio, you can write a script that forces one ratio on all devices. The consequence of that? You can get either letterboxing or pillarboxing:

image credit: https://www.redsharknews.com/distribution/item/1870-what-you-need-to-know-about-aspect-ratios-and-letterboxing

You can also try scaling the game screen to fit the display, but that can introduce stretched sprites that will look terrible on some devices.

My solution for this project was to letterbox anything with a width less than 16, and keep anything above the same. I wanted to take advantage of the wider screens on newer phones such as the iPhone 11 and Google Pixel 4XL, since I figured that this ultra-wide trend would continue. This poses a slight gameplay disadvantage to narrower phones, but I decided that it wasn't big enough of a deal to change it. 

You can find a script for enforcing the aspect ratio here: 
​wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=AspectRatioEnforcer&_ga=2.210088221.963739956.1580830318-740822168.1561571238
​
​That's about it for this post. Next time I'll talk about resolution and image compression sizes.