679

As I move incrementally forward on my personal game project, I keep updating how I do things behind the scenes. The game is a top down, 2D, arcade style, game with a look that aims to hover somewhere in the mid 90s. So 2D pixel art, but run on hardware that can throw some graphical sparkle around. Except the game isn’t 2D and none of what you are looking at is pixel art. Under the hood, it’s all 3D models, skeletal animations, and shaders. In some ways, that is a more difficult task than making a 2D game with 2D graphics, but it also lets me get away with a lot that would also be difficult in 2D. Besides, I know 3D graphics and shaders. It’s sort of cool to have fun with those. Up until recently, the game included a bunch of flat polygons with textures on them as a stand in for the tile based graphics of a lot of older arcade and console hardware. For a few reasons I have removed all of those textures and now everything in the game is actually flat-ish, shaded polygons. Again, some of the things I am doing to create the art might be easier with textured polygons, but this shaded polygon approach also lets me get away with some effects and animations that would be very difficult any other way. Making each tile or prop object is pretty quick and easy, and there are a load of Blender and Godot tricks that I am using to make 3D models look like 2D sprites. One day I will probably do a whole write up on how the graphics in my game get drawn to the screen, but for now, I think I will stick to working on getting more systems into a playable state. My hope is, once people are actually able to play it, they won’t much care how the pixels are being lit. They will just want to run around and interact with the world.