Full screen or windowed mode for casual games?

Hi All,

Just wondering which mode should a casual game be set to when the user first plays it...

Full screen or windows mode?

I prefer windows mode, but I have seen a lot which starts full screen..

Cheers

I would prefer windowed mode too.

Windowed mode. How casual can a game be if its fullscreen?

Small/puzzle games -> windowed
Large RPGs -> fullscreen

I estimate casual stands for the first..

I believe that most successful casual games go straight to full screen. That might seem odd but I think people just prefer the game to fill the screen. Just like people don't like watching movies in letterbox mode on a standard TV.

The portals will insist it is full-screen to start with and has a windowed mode on the options page. The experience is supposed to be "immersive" and it won't be as much in windowed mode.

I prefer windowed too, but I understand why the portals want it to fill the screen.

Same as CS_TBL, windowed for casual games, Large RPG's - fullscreen.

Generally, fullscreen. Casual means a game you can pick up and play for a few minutes at a time. Windowed for something dinky like minesweeper.

i hate nothing more than want to be cool casual trash with enforced 1024x768 fullscreen. you have not enough imagination to see how shitty this looks on a 1680x1050 screen.

so whatever you do, make sure that it can be switched!

Why don't you have a window that's full screen?

Offer both and Start in a window with an options menu.

As JP and GA already said, all the portals will insist that it starts in Fullscreen and has an option for windowed.

Browser embedded ...

I prefer full screen, for some reason, windowed games seem to lose their shine, casual or not...

one blitz game from yonks ago was window only at a small size at that (320*240 ish but perhaps more of a rectangle downwards) and on 1024 it was a pain to see what you were doing so you had to drop to 800*600 just to see the damn thing

so factoring in random monitor sizes and resolutions what looks great for you might be titchy for someone else
even if the casual gamers market still gets listed as using 800*600 their will always be others not

The problem with full screen is if the game is network enabled and people need to exempt it through their firewall. We had that problem with Market Value since it had an online scoreboard.

So drop back to windowed mode the first time you go online to send a high score. Presumably you don't go online without prompting anyway, as doing so would probably concern quite a few casual gamers regardless. You only need to be windowed briefly, and only the first time so that they can disable their firewall.

That's an interesting point as I had REAL problems with Icewind Dale II and the firewall on vista because it was running in full-screen.

Full screen 800x600, with an option to change resolution and switch to windowed mode.

Having had zero experience with casual game production, yet, I would go for fullscreen by default but make it easy to reach the desktop or get to a windowed mode.

why not leave simple option so user can choose fullscreen or windowed??

You do. But you also need a default.

I prefer windowed mode myself, but appreciate a game that uses a somewhat standard keyboard shortcut like alt-enter or F10 to switch between fullscreen/windowed modes...

but most of the time I find windowed mode too distracting (the un-related other stuff visible around the edges reduces the immersion in the game), plus on most computers the 3D performance is significantly lower in windowed mode than in full-screen.

Especially on less-than-stellar video cards everything simply runs a lot smoother in full-screen mode -- and remember: a first impression is everything.

funny enough, on my main system, dx7 games perform better in windowed than in fullscreen. this holds for some dx9 ones as well (LOTRO for example performs nearly twice as good in windowed, where MSN Messenger Plus desktop overlay impacts it?!)

The second reason (above the one I mentioned on top) I only play games with windowed mode is that I often need to communicate to study comrades, my girlfriends or programmers and the like ... so its a good thing to be able to have the game and msn side a side

OT: you have girlfriends on MSN? o.O

Are these proper "girlfriends" or people you've never actually met?

my realworld GF logically. As we don't life together, we chat with each other when we are not together