Whilst that is true in most cases, the exception I think is when that dev decides to make a "HD" iPad version of the game. Having invested their time into upscaling the artwork for the iPad, 1 would think it shouldn't be too difficult to rework those new "HD" assets into a retina version for iPhone.The resolutions and chipsets of the devices are very similar, so it shouldn't be all that difficult, should it? I'm pretty sure that's the reason why Gameloft has been pumping out retina display support updates to lots of its back catalogue - they've been hard at work upscaling them for iPad anyway.
most if not any gameloft games are in 3d.. offering retina support comes at an alot lower cost since they just need to render the screen in higher res. they didnt updated the textures or polycount of models etc. , the would need to change some 2d art of gui and menue (which they do not in all of their retina updates) but thats it.. changing a 2d game to retina if you have no hd gfx is alot of work.. because like state earlier you need to redo all of youre assets. if you create new game from the ground up you need to consider retina support from the startup. it will give you 10-20% more overhead in the gfx departmend depandant on the actual game, to create youre art in highres first and then scale down for low res devices..
Another significant problem is the lack of precision that pixel-doubled games have. It's very prevalent in games like Undercroft where everything is tiny.
You missed the entire point of my post. I'll quote the main point: What I was trying to say is that by the time a dev has invested their time and money into upscaling a game for the iPad, they already have assets of high enough quality for the retina display, and in all likelihood could use those same assets. At that point it doesn't matter if it was 2d or 3d as they've already done the work.
I've been working on adding retina display to Harbor Master full time for over 3 weeks now, and that's just on the code. The artist probably spent about 2 weeks full time upscaling all the artwork. It's really a lot more complicated than people think. And even though we already have an HD version for the iPad, that doesn't really help, since the iPad has a different aspect ratio than the iPhone 4, so we still have to create all new art for the iPhone 4 anyway.
Most of the games without retina support aren't THAT bad. It only becomes an annoyance with text sometimes because it's kind of an eye strain.
I've been working on a solution to force games to render in HD. I posted a test release that enables Zombie Infection to render at 960x640, and it looks amazing. The thread is called Retinasizer. The goal is for this to work on all OpenGL games. Jailbroken iphone4 required.
