Double checking if we're using tk2d properly

[AurayStudios]

Hi everyone,

We're a small studio doing educational apps for Android, our first app relies heavily on 2D Toolkit. We've been working on it for several months, and wanted to confirm from more experienced users, if we're using 2D Toolkit correctly.

We target phones and tablets, and have designed all of our artwork at the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2's 1280x752. 480x320 is the minimum size we target. We work with 32bit RGBA png files for the sprites and make full use of 2D Toolkit for atlasing and animation.

My question is: are we approaching texture size correctly? Our builds are 52Mb, and even though we have lots of custom art, I think they're pretty big and that we could do better.

Should we design for 1280x752 or 480x320? I have researched a lot and cannot seem to find clarity on this. We are planning to port our app to iOS next. If we design at 480x320 will it look good on the 2048x1536 retina display?

Any link to a tutorial on this that really goes into the details would be greatly appreciated!

Additionally, I know there is no one resolution that fits all devices and is optimal. To avoid letterboxing we use 5% of extra texture around all 4 sides of the image. That way when the tk2dCamera rescales, we don't get letterboxing.

Is our approach of creating 1280x752 32bit RGBA pngs correct? Is there something we should be doing differently to get smaller builds and better performance?

[unikronsoftware]

You can try PNG atlases to reduce the build size - Unity will not compress textures out of the box, and PNG textures work around this, but there is a load time cost associated with this.

You should design for 480x320, but you'll need platform collections to deal with the upscaled resolutions. For 2048x1536, the closest upscaled res will be 4x, i.e. 1920x1920 in this case. You can adjust the base resolution to make it overflow a bit to get better utilisation at 2048x1536, but thats a choice you'll have to make.

You can work at 1280x752 as the base resolution too, but if you want to go down to 480x320, you should probably treat that as 2x. 1x will then be 640x376 which will overflow a bit on 480x320.