Ironically, I think a large part of the sense of scale comes from it being a vertical video. Really helps with stacking all these layers of environment on top of each other. Anyway, Rückenfigur (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCckenfigur) style concept art where there's a tiny figure in front of a huge layered environment has been common in games for decades, the difference is that with ai we can create """concepts""" that look nearly like a playable demo.
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.
In a youtube demo, the author says he has been working on this idea for a while, and was motivated to deliver after the GIF. So, kinda? Thanks for the reference.
I don’t think it’s ai because it correctly resolves both vertical and horizontal parallax with correct perspective lines applied to the scene - something ai still seems to struggle at greatly
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?
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.
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.
Agreed. I tend not to announce or even share plans for impending projects until I have something nominally concrete.
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.
Given the call to action is to wishlist the game or subscribe to their mailing list, I guess they could use the interest to validate their idea or even to try and get funding.
The standard marketing advice in game development is to announce your game and launch your Steam page as early as possible to start collecting wishlists. In fact, considering how much footage and gameplay they are showing off I would say they are announcing it too late. So I don't agree that it's too early in the development compared to other indie titles.
It's to give yourself some form of accountability if you have a strong habit of never completing projects. When you've made a website for it, suddenly it feels like something that you need to work on.
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.
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 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")
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.
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.
Yeah, I don't think this is anything revolutionary. I was thinking they were actually doing something a-la DOOM's pseudo 3D, but no, this is definitely just downscaled 3D.
Readit News
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY?si=iKXJSNIuLiU5nOnj
Cool gif nevertheless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY
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.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-06873-015
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.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2419670/Eclipsium/