I have the screen size for the ipad, 768 by 1024. Now when your talking about 256x224, were you referring to the background or just overall screen size? the background is 3000 by 750..
I was referring to the game resolution. Not the size of the background, not the size of your monitor or screen. If I were to play a game like Cave Story, despite having a 1024x768 monitor playing it in full screen, the game resolution is actually 320x240, putting aside technicalities involved with fonts.
If I paint at the normal image size is there a way to get my pencil brush to snap to the larger grid per block? I would take my large image say the tree and go from its normal size to a 100 by whatever and then paint it because I was able to paint per pixel block..anyway to keep it at the normal scale and have photoshop adjust to it? hopefully that makes since. when i paint at a larger scale it lets me paint all over the blocks and never just fills the blocks in fully so it loses the effect of being blocky.
An easy way to have your brushwork to snap to a grid is to work at a very small size and use the pencil tool. If for some reason you need it bigger, scale the dimensions by a factor of a whole number. A 16x16 sprite should scale cleanly into 32x32 or 48x48. Do not think of scaling it into resolutions like 24x24, and do not try editing your work after scaling it up. If you need to make adjustments, undo your scaling; if you made your 16x16 sprite into a 48x48, making every pixel nine times bigger then scale it back to 16x16, making every pixel exactly nine times smaller.