Maybe I'm missing something, but is it intentional for the playing window to be much smaller than the actual screen? Have it on full screen and everything settings wise, but still that huge border of wasted space.
If you're playing above 1024x768, then yeah you wind up with border. Please see: http://arcengames.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Tidalis_-_Common_Technical_Support_Questions#I_set_the_screen_resolution_higher_than_1280x768.2C_and_now_I_have_black_bars
It's the same thing as with Tidalis. Scaling in code looks HORRIBLE and is really slow. So adjusting your screen resolution down is going to get you something crisper that is also small. Unlike various other 2D games, however, we don't lock your screen resolution to something tiny. Something like Lone Survivor is (I believe) locked around 640x480 or so. It works for that game's aesthetic in particular, but we like to give people the flexibility since we're doing crisp pixelart versus more impressionistic (which is NOT a slur on Lone Survivor, I though it's graphics were really effective).
I still say this one is going to be a major sticking point when it comes to alot of potential buyers..... you know how gamers can be about the visuals in a given game. The fact that you can change the resolution of the screen itself simply wont occur to many (or they might just think it's stupid).
Heck, *I* have had to limit my time with this one, as this is one of the very, very rare games that can actually cause me eye strain. To put it in perspective, no other game I currently have anywhere on this PC has that effect..... at all. And Windows gets a little STRANGE if I try to change the overall resolution (as does the stuff related to my video drivers), so normally I avoid doing this like the plague. And that's a shame, because this seriously is a really good game.
Either way though, this seems to be progressing nicely! I'll be interested to see what happens when it releases.
Okay, this is in:
* Previously the game would default to your desktop resolution, which could easily be wildly too large, making the game tiny.
** Now the screen defaults to 1440x900 if your graphics card supports that, or 1024x768 if your graphics supports that, or whatever your smallest supported (by both the game and your GPU) resolution is. Only if unity for some reason can't detect any supported screen resolutions at all will it now use your desktop resolution.
In terms of the eyestrain thing, if you're playing at the native resolution of the game that really shouldn't be a problem. If you're playing at the native resolution of your monitor, that's really going to vary wildly. The game will now default to something much closer to its native resolution, but if you play in windowed mode that's going to give you trouble. There shouldn't be any trouble with changing the resolution when in fullscreen mode with this game, as it won't mess with your desktop resolution. If there's something odd with your drivers being broken or what have you, then either something like Penumbra was suggesting might be good, or else simply getting a different driver version that works better.
Hope that helps, anyhow -- not much that I can do beyond that, because scaling in-game just looks gratuitously awful and also is a real GPU hog. So you'd get something uglier and less-performant, not a good combo.