This looks really cool and I will doubtless play, if it ever comes out. Unfortunately I get Hytale vibes from this website. I don't understand the point of announcing such a project, not least with such an elaborate landing page, so early in development.
I appreciate the work but as someone who grew up playing these games and quake and blood and all those novalogic titles, it was never about the graphics. They were just fun.
In a sense the pastiche nostalgia reminds me of the 80s retro boom. It is way over the top to the degree that nothing back then looked or sounded like that. It was more low key and subdued.
I like the pixelated look, but that's probably nostalgia.
Presumably this effect was achieved using a shader rather than an old school software renderer like old-school Quake and Half-Life (the last games I remember where you could switch between OpenGL and "software renderer")
I had an idea a little back about using hand-drawn mipmaps (.5x, 1x, 2x, etc) scales for sprites, with some method for nearest neighbor, (e.g. with a 3x scale taking pixels from the 2x and the 4x scale). I imagined I wasn't the first to have that idea, but it was just a passing thought. I wonder if OP is doing anything like that?
Fun art style and I'm sure there's some interesting tech behind the renderer/shader - to my eye it looks like the pixels don't shift much as the camera pans, which would naturally happen a fair bit if you're simply doing nearest-neighbour sampling. I'd like to see some gameplay though; so far it's just a tech demo, albeit a very pretty one.
A recent game, Eclipsium[0], was a short horror game with a similar esthetic. I really liked it for the simple gameplay and the short (less than 4 hours) completion time.
Why would I want to play a game where the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, trying to get a bit less poor myself? I already do that in the real world.
Yeah, it definitely seems like it is 3D. If it wasn't you'd expect a lot more pop-in and jumps when you cross a scaling threshold. It's a cool effect, but it's like a voxel pass on a 3D world AFAICT.
This is super trippy. I saw the screenshots first and though "Huh, they really nailed that early point-and-click RPG vibe. Neat, but only mildly interesting". Then I clicked on the video and realized it's 3D. "Oh..."
The castle in the distance really gives me some sort of surreal feeling of fleshing out areas that didn't exist in the old games. Back then, the highly degraded road in the distance you understood to just sort of be skipped if you clicked on the castle, whereas with this, that little brown, poorly rendered strip is an actual place you will traverse and have come alive. Neat.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 42.7 ms ] threadIn a sense the pastiche nostalgia reminds me of the 80s retro boom. It is way over the top to the degree that nothing back then looked or sounded like that. It was more low key and subdued.
For that reason, I'm out.
https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1947024682118488116
https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1947024682118488116
I am not sure this project is capturing the strangely compelling sense of scale shown in that GIF, but it's nice to see someone taking a shot at it.
I had an idea a little back about using hand-drawn mipmaps (.5x, 1x, 2x, etc) scales for sprites, with some method for nearest neighbor, (e.g. with a 3x scale taking pixels from the 2x and the 4x scale). I imagined I wasn't the first to have that idea, but it was just a passing thought. I wonder if OP is doing anything like that?
Anyways, very neat.
How about no? Damn, this has been going on for a while now. I have around 5 titles in my wishlist that are dead by now.
A recent game, Eclipsium[0], was a short horror game with a similar esthetic. I really liked it for the simple gameplay and the short (less than 4 hours) completion time.
I wonder if it can carry a larger scale.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2419670/Eclipsium/
The castle in the distance really gives me some sort of surreal feeling of fleshing out areas that didn't exist in the old games. Back then, the highly degraded road in the distance you understood to just sort of be skipped if you clicked on the castle, whereas with this, that little brown, poorly rendered strip is an actual place you will traverse and have come alive. Neat.