I’m working on a 90s-style dungeon crawler and trying to decide whether to build the game at a true low resolution (480x270) or emulate the low-res look while using a higher resolution. The game will be 2d (Emulating the feeling of 3d depth). So far I’ve made it low res, but i am having trouble with the readability of text. Alternatively i thought of emulating it in high resolution, as it seems to give me more flexibility. What would be the prefered method?
The “preferred method” is entirely up to you.
It sounds like you need to make some mockups to see what you want.
Get out Unity or Photoshop or whatever you want and cobble together some assets to show off the various combinations you contemplate doing.
If you do it with layers / layering / parenting, you can easily turn on and off different versions (low res, high res) of each thing and see how they match up.
In a 2D project pixelating (downscaling) high-res graphics will give you a different look than creating pixel art in the desired resolution. The downscaling causes aliasing particularly if the downscale is not by a multiple of 2. The high-res graphics will also consume more resources (CPU/GPU, memory, disk space).
Downscaling text to low res may also look worse than a properly scaled text. However you may need to use a different font. Legibility of pixel text is all about the font unless the scale is absurdly small ie less than 16 pixels per letter. You can also separately render a font at high resolution and downscale it when using TextMeshPro.
If you want the pixelated 90s look with no “modern” variant then I’d say it’s best to use low res graphics. Otherwise if the retro look should be switchable, downscaling from high res art is the route to go.