Project Shadowglass
shadowglassgame.com
shadowglassgame.com
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.
Cool gif nevertheless.
This game looks cool, but also the trailer just showing 3 static scenes from the same angle for a minute is a sure sign that this is very very early.
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.
If you go frame by frame, the texture becomes more detailed, about 8x as many pixels. It looks like a normal LOD switch as the camera gets close to the wall. It might be a texture without enough in-between scales.
Interestingly there was a paper from a few years back where they found that a participant's commitment was found to diminish in the long term if they prematurely shared their goals.
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.
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.
The creator hints a bit at things in this video: https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY?t=2m55s
From the Wikipedia page for DLSS:
The goal of these technologies is to allow the majority of the graphics pipeline to run at a lower resolution for increased performance, and then infer a higher resolution image from this that approximates the same level of detail as if the image had been rendered at this higher resolution. This allows for higher graphical settings and/or frame rates for a given output resolution, depending on user preference.
Voxels is quite different: the world is made of cubes of 1 size or various size cubes (any texturing method can apply here, or without, some even use gradient shaders on the cubes).
So you get that pixel art vibe, mapped into the 3D world with smooth movements. The 3D window isn't made of stairs.
In this case, this is done "properly". Because some developers just use normal geometry, normal texturing with bilinear filtering, and slap a post processing shader on the camera view, which makes the view "blocky" without the world actually being blocky - which is cheap, and typically looks cheap.
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 think what's getting people interested in this project is the sense of wonder they get from the visuals. Who knows if they can deliver, but there's something about how this looks that gives me a sense of wonder.
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.
For that reason, I'm out.