So last night I downloaded and spent a little time playing Lost Cities on XBox Live Arcade. Lost Cities is a card game, and I’m a big fan of board/card/etc. games, and really enjoy them when computerised, particularly when they use the computer to automate things which had been annoying without a computer. For example, scoring in Carcasonne is really painful and error-prone when you’re doing it manually, so having a video game version do it automatically is awesome.

So imagine my surprise when I realised that Lost Cities assumes the user has a high-definition screen, and that every pixel it draws is going to actually be visible on the user’s screen. For those of us still using standard definition screens (I believe that we’re still the majority?) there’s a thing called the “safe zone”, which specifies the pixels which you can always assume will be visible on everyone’s screen, no matter what sort of television they have. To find the “safe zone”, you basically just remove 10% of the width and the height of the screen; the middle bit remaining is the “safe zone”; the part that you can safely use to display important information. Outside that might be lost under the frame of the television.

So I was all looking forward to Lost Cities, only to discover that its font was needlessly small, making it very difficult to read on my screen, and then to discover that important information (for example, my score) is apparently being displayed inside the safe zone, and cannot be seen at all on my television.

Ever wonder why virtually every console game out there floats your health bar and other data on top of the game image, a short distance in from the corner of the screen, whereas PC games usually use a solid bar at the very edge of the screen to show that information? It’s the safe frame; we don’t actually know where the edges of the screen are going to be on console games, and so we have to just put the information somewhere away from the edges of the screen so we can be certain that everyone will be able to see it, whereas PC monitors don’t have that problem.

Now, the safe zone has been around for an awfully long time. Anybody who’s ever developed a game for a console older than the latest crop will already know all about it. Additionally, anyone who’s worked on television broadcasts knows about it as well. Everything from the nightly news to the latest Wii games all obey the safe zone, and do not put important text or other information at the edges of the screen. Almost all of the next-gen full-price games are built with the safe zone in mind. But a lot of new XBox Live Arcade games are being written by people who have only worked on the PC before, and many of these companies seem to assume that a television display is basically like a PC display, when it really isn’t.

So I was all annoyed at this, when it suddenly occurred to me that none of my VectorStorm games obey the safe frame. And what’s worse, the VectorStorm engine doesn’t even provide any debug tools for showing where the safe frame actually is. Now granted, VectorStorm currently only runs on normal computers which will have normal monitors which will display the whole video image. But who knows; someday I might port VectorStorm over to the XBox 360 or PS3 or something else (stop looking at me like that; it could happen! ;) ), and at that point, none of the games I’ve written for it would actually play nicely on standard def screens.

So here’s a big TODO for me: Add a debug feature to the core VectorStorm engine, to draw the borders of the safe zone to the screen.  This will be useful when developing games, so that I can easily lay things out relative to the safe zone and keep my informational displays (score, lives left, etc) safely on screen just in case I someday port the thing over to a real game console.