Mobile Device Screen Sizes

Hello fellow Stencylers, I'm hoping one of the more seasoned mobile developers here may be able to point me in the right direction.

I'm currently working on a mobile game (iOS mainly but android eventualy) and was wondering how everybody deals with the different device sizes. Last time I built a mobile game using Stencyl standard practice was to build the game at 320x480 and have the engine scale it up (I think using stretch to fit).
This meant that the game would look the same on all devices and that people on larger devices wouldn't be able to see more of the game screen. Is this still the case as I can see on the forums that some people are using full screen but doesn't this mean more of the game is visible on larger devices?

Also I was wondering how to deal with each different device size? Is it better to have a different scene for each device and then detect the screen size when loading and then open the correct scene or does everybody just have their UI detect the screen size and them move accordingly (I've currently been doing this to account for the notch on the iPhone XR).

I can see plus and minus points for both cases so was just wondering what the standard practice is with stencyl at the moment.

Thanks for reading

John

It depends on what kind of fullscreen you are using. "Fullscreen" fullscreen just changes the screen size to fit the device's screen, "stretch" stretches, and the scale options all scale the game up to fit the device's screen.

As for dealing with different device sizes, you can just use "scale to fit".

I used full screen (scale to fit). I anchor my UI to the screen and move set it to adjust with the screen size. (and make further adjustments for devices with a notch). Using this set up mean that more width is show on an iPhone and more hight is shown on an iPad.

Hi Colburt187 and Nerdinanutshell, thanks for the help.

So it sounds like if I design my game at 320x480 and use fullscreen (scale to fit) I should be ok?
Should I also turn off anti aliasing and only include 1x assets like the old days (its a pixel art game) or is there a different practice now?

Thanks

If you’re doing pixel art sets scaling to no smoothing whenever you import a new image (you may have to reimport assets that have already been put in if you haven’t already). Otherwise your pixel art will be blurry.