What is going on that makes pixel games not viewed too small ?

Are the pixels enlarged by the artist scaling the images or is the programmer doing something like using a camera to zoom in on the entire map ?

Here's two examples that I want to know. I'm more interested on what went on with Hyper Light Drifter, because it was made using Game Maker.

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I don't understand your question. Do you mean how do you zoom an image without pixelating it?

You can achieve this effect with many different ways

- draw bigger images -> waste of memory, but more details possible or mixing pixelated and highres images

- draw on a smaller texture and then draw this texture on a bigger quad -> need some math for ratio calculations, picking,...

- zoom in with matrixparameters in orthogonal projection -> probably the most common technique

Make sure to not use any filtering for your texture sampling or you get a blurry instead of pixelated output

With Direct3D, you can also just change the resolution of the display buffer/viewport.

Your monitor might display a square with multiple pixels, but the image itself could be just one pixel occupying a single 'pixel' in the back buffer (for example).

There are several algorithms used to upscale pixel images, and even to depixelate them. Wikipedia has a long list to choose from, and that list is incomplete.

The result is generally far better than simple bilinear scaling or 2x scaling.

yes to Frederic question and thank you all