I was getting the game ready for Super MAGFest and the Turn Based Carnival sale, and I was testing one of my builds on the Steam Deck. I popped over to play some of my other favorite pixel art games (Axiom Verge specifically).

I noticed the pixel art in that game and was impressed with how crisp it looked. I then took a second look at Mooselutions and figured something must be wrong because it wasn't quite as crisp.

(For those of you who are super nerdy and technical, Mooselutions uses a pixel art scaling shader that does bilinear interpolation to blend ever so slightly, but only at texel boundaries. Inside of a texel, the shader samples the texel color, resulting in non-blurry pixel art scaling at non-integer multiples of the texture. It is very convenient because it means I don't have to letterbox the game and can arbitrarily scale textures so long as I preserve the aspect ratio.)

Anyway, I thought something might be wrong with this specific shader, so I tried a few experiments to rule out the shader and found the shader not to be responsible for the slight blurriness.

Instead, it turned out it was a problem integrating with the Windows API. My game's viewport wasn't exactly set to the window's content area size, so there was a teeny tiny amount of stretching which was fairly visible at much smaller window sizes.

This latest update fixes that discrepancy, and the consequence is pixel art that is just as crisp as Axiom Verge is on the Steam Deck. I think you'll find it much more pleasing on the eye.