3 ms·

low-poly (and often untextured) 3D models is already a style being used in indie gamedev, seeme like it came into vogue a year or two ago. chiptunes are also a

low-poly (and often untextured) 3D models is already a style being used in indie gamedev, seeme like it came into vogue a year or two ago. chiptunes are also a stylistic choice some games make over full hi def sounds and music.

failrate 7y ago
Lopoly and pixel art also has the advantage of being cheaper and faster to produce at an acceptable quality. Indies cannot produce AAA quality assets.
- mopsi 7y ago
  They also tend to age better because they never tried to look realistic in the first place. Cartoonish remains cartoonish, but realistic becomes dated.
usrusr 7y ago
Going off on a tangent, I'd really love to see a game that pushed production values within the artificial constraint of zero texture, just flat shaded geometry, while maxing out modern hardware. That would be the computer graphics style I dreamt of while growing up between X-Wing on the PC and Money for Nothing on MTV.
- cr0sh 7y ago
  If you've ever watched any of the "Mind's Eye" CGI videos (which were just older CGI of the 70s, 80s, and some early 90s set to music) - you can get an idea of what your fantasy might look like in full motion. Most of those old systems and animations didn't use texture mapping and relied on heavier polygon usage, because that's what the hardware could do, while still generating a frame in a reasonable time for transfer to film (still - we aren't talking any kind of "real-time"). While texture mapping was known how to do (sometime in the late 60s or early 70s - can't recall) - doing it with the hardware at the time was extremely slow, so it wasn't used much (IIRC, one of the first CGI films to use it was Sunstone). Instead, most used hardware that could either do flat-filled polys, or some form of shading (Gouraud, then later Phong). So to make things look good they relied on more detail (more polys and colors) and less on textures (which can hide low-count vertex polys). The original Tron might also be a good approximation (though from what I recall, it was hand colored from black-and-white computer rendered cels - not sure)...

failrate 7y ago

Lopoly and pixel art also has the advantage of being cheaper and faster to produce at an acceptable quality. Indies cannot produce AAA quality assets.

mopsi 7y ago
They also tend to age better because they never tried to look realistic in the first place. Cartoonish remains cartoonish, but realistic becomes dated.

usrusr 7y ago

Going off on a tangent, I'd really love to see a game that pushed production values within the artificial constraint of zero texture, just flat shaded geometry, while maxing out modern hardware. That would be the computer graphics style I dreamt of while growing up between X-Wing on the PC and Money for Nothing on MTV.

cr0sh 7y ago
If you've ever watched any of the "Mind's Eye" CGI videos (which were just older CGI of the 70s, 80s, and some early 90s set to music) - you can get an idea of what your fantasy might look like in full motion. Most of those old systems and animations didn't use texture mapping and relied on heavier polygon usage, because that's what the hardware could do, while still generating a frame in a reasonable time for transfer to film (still - we aren't talking any kind of "real-time"). While texture mapping was known how to do (sometime in the late 60s or early 70s - can't recall) - doing it with the hardware at the time was extremely slow, so it wasn't used much (IIRC, one of the first CGI films to use it was Sunstone). Instead, most used hardware that could either do flat-filled polys, or some form of shading (Gouraud, then later Phong). So to make things look good they relied on more detail (more polys and colors) and less on textures (which can hide low-count vertex polys). The original Tron might also be a good approximation (though from what I recall, it was hand colored from black-and-white computer rendered cels - not sure)...