Resolution and Aspect Ration Independent 2D Game Engine Design

[LP]

I find this interesting. Right now I'm mostly thinking in classical 2d action games/platformer etc. where the spatial relations between game objects are important. As I see it the layouts will primarily describe different UI layouts. You can't change the game world presentation because this will result in different experinces of the game. The extra space gained using wider aspect ratios can mostly be used for HUD display and insignificant parts of the game world. Or do you disagree with this statement?

You may not be able to change game world presentation, but you can use it in different layouts (e.g. world on top, hud on bottom, etc.). You can also design HUD with dynamic elements so that it can be presented in a variety of shapes to accommodate for different world positions.

Regarding properly DPI handling. What do you think properly DPI handling means? I was thinking of using assets of a high resolution and then downscale. I know resolution doesn't equal DPI or PPI but we typically only use resolution in pixels when talking about graphics in computer games. Is it that important to think in DPI instead? I can imagine that you could possibly gain from increasing font size on high DPI screens but does this the mean you'll have to create layouts for different aspect ratios and different DPI?

DPI and PPI are exchangeable, so it's the same thing really. One issue is that not all high-DPI displays are properly configured in Windows, so you can see poor users reading tiny text on their 14'' laptop with 1920×1080 resolution, which is mainly due to poor application support. Properly handling different DPI scenarios requires having images in different sizes, or as you said, using larger images and downsizing them on the fly while drawing (use proper mipmapping and antialiasing settings for this). You don't need to create separate layout rather than using a dynamic layout where you automatically specify the size for each of the layers and the elements inside each layer are also automatically accommodated.