5 ms·

Project Shadowglass

125 points by layer8 1y ago

rappatic 1y ago
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.
- vunderba 1y ago
  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. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-06873-015 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-06873-015
- Aeolun 1y ago
  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.
- zdc1 1y ago
  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.
- Kiro 1y ago
  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.
- deckar01 1y ago
  I’m still waiting for Eitr.
  - jamilton 1y ago
    I’m sure miegakure is going to come out any day now.
uvaursi 1y ago
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.
- tclancy 1y ago
  As a child of the 80s, I see it as an homage to King’s Quest and games like that (with a touch of Defender of the Crown), but I suppose the beauty of an alpha release ad is it’s simply a Rorschach blot for us to project whatever we want to see on it.
- allenu 1y ago
  I wouldn't go so far as to say it was "never" about the graphics. There was definitely a sense of wonder when I first saw Wolfenstein 3D, then Doom, and later Quake. It was the graphics that got you first and made you think, "Oh wow, I can wander around this world?!" Thankfully, they were fun games as well. 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.
LarsDu88 1y ago
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")
poopiokaka 1y ago
[dead]
fallat 1y ago
"Early alpha trailer" For that reason, I'm out.
- khazhoux 1y ago
  What separates being out from being in? None of us can play the game yet.
asadm 1y ago
this seems to be inspired by the extremely viral ai-generated video: https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1947024682118488116 https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1947024682118488116
quacked 1y ago
I believe the concept for this project is an AI-generated pixel art GIF that went very viral on X a few months ago: 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.
- zdrummond 1y ago
  It does not appear to be AI, and is a passion project by a single developer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY
  - Tiberium 1y ago
    The concept (the X link) is AI-generated with Midjourney, the game isn't.
- karlgkk 1y ago
  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
- Tiberium 1y ago
  Two other replies to this comment seem to have missed the fact that the inspiration for the game is AI-generated, the game itself is not made with AI.
- xixixao 1y ago
  What makes you believe that? The video the author put out doesn’t mention that. Cool gif nevertheless.
  - gyomu 1y ago
    https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1949291379655373061 https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1949291379655373061
lynndotpy 1y ago
Makes me think of the voxel displacement renderer ( https://blog.danielschroeder.me/blog/voxel-displacement-modernizing-retro-3d/ https://blog.danielschroeder.me/blog/voxel-displacement-mode... ) from a year ago. 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.
- MattRix 1y ago
  That mipmaps thing is an interesting idea!
  - lynndotpy 1y ago
    I'm sure I wasn't the first to think of it, and I think that's roughly what we're seeing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY&t=108s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY&t=108s 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.
2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
What’s the difference between this and voxels?
- keyle 1y ago
  The difference is, this is "normal" geometry, with fixed 64x64 textures (or similar) mapped with hard edges (nearest-neighbour filtering, no bilinear/trilinear/blur). 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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Havoc 1y ago
Love the name. They should keep it
rckt 1y ago
> Wishlist and follow dev updates 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.
jsmailes 1y ago
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.
fishbacon 1y ago
Looks amazing. 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/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2419670/Eclipsium/
the-kenny 1y ago
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.
- Klaster_1 1y ago
  Any game you'd recommend where that's not true?
davedx 1y ago
"3D pixel art" = a 3D engine running in a lower resolution? It looks like 320x200
- mfro 1y ago
  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.
  - layer8 1y ago
    Downscaled 3D doesn’t create such a stable pixel structure across movements.
    - mfro 1y ago
      Depends on the technique used. Temporal methods don’t look this way but standard downscaling can.
      - layer8 1y ago
        I don’t really see how. What do you mean by “temporal methods”?
        mfro 1y ago
        By temporal I refer to DLSS, FSR, TSR, etc. In this game's case, I imagine it's not as simple as downscaling, there is probably some shader work involved similar to this: https://youtu.be/Cwh_TpouPfQ https://youtu.be/Cwh_TpouPfQ
        layer8 1y ago
        DLSS, FSR, TSR are for upscaling, not downscaling, so I’m not sure how they would apply anyway. The creator hints a bit at things in this video: https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY?t=2m55s https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY?t=2m55s
Rooster61 1y ago
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.
jdlyga 1y ago
This is everything we imagined point and click games to be as kids.
layer8 1y ago
The creator talks a bit more about it in this video: https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY

125 points by layer8 1y ago

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.

vunderba 1y ago
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. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-06873-015 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-06873-015
Aeolun 1y ago
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.
zdc1 1y ago
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.
Kiro 1y ago
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.
deckar01 1y ago
I’m still waiting for Eitr.
- jamilton 1y ago
  I’m sure miegakure is going to come out any day now.

uvaursi 1y ago

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.

tclancy 1y ago
As a child of the 80s, I see it as an homage to King’s Quest and games like that (with a touch of Defender of the Crown), but I suppose the beauty of an alpha release ad is it’s simply a Rorschach blot for us to project whatever we want to see on it.
allenu 1y ago
I wouldn't go so far as to say it was "never" about the graphics. There was definitely a sense of wonder when I first saw Wolfenstein 3D, then Doom, and later Quake. It was the graphics that got you first and made you think, "Oh wow, I can wander around this world?!" Thankfully, they were fun games as well. 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.

LarsDu88 1y ago

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")

poopiokaka 1y ago

[dead]

fallat 1y ago

"Early alpha trailer" For that reason, I'm out.

khazhoux 1y ago
What separates being out from being in? None of us can play the game yet.

asadm 1y ago

this seems to be inspired by the extremely viral ai-generated video: https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1947024682118488116 https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1947024682118488116

quacked 1y ago

I believe the concept for this project is an AI-generated pixel art GIF that went very viral on X a few months ago: 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.

zdrummond 1y ago
It does not appear to be AI, and is a passion project by a single developer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY
- Tiberium 1y ago
  The concept (the X link) is AI-generated with Midjourney, the game isn't.
karlgkk 1y ago
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
Tiberium 1y ago
Two other replies to this comment seem to have missed the fact that the inspiration for the game is AI-generated, the game itself is not made with AI.
xixixao 1y ago
What makes you believe that? The video the author put out doesn’t mention that. Cool gif nevertheless.
- gyomu 1y ago
  https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1949291379655373061 https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1949291379655373061

lynndotpy 1y ago

Makes me think of the voxel displacement renderer ( https://blog.danielschroeder.me/blog/voxel-displacement-modernizing-retro-3d/ https://blog.danielschroeder.me/blog/voxel-displacement-mode... ) from a year ago. 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.

MattRix 1y ago
That mipmaps thing is an interesting idea!
- lynndotpy 1y ago
  I'm sure I wasn't the first to think of it, and I think that's roughly what we're seeing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY&t=108s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY&t=108s 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.

2muchcoffeeman 1y ago

What’s the difference between this and voxels?

keyle 1y ago
The difference is, this is "normal" geometry, with fixed 64x64 textures (or similar) mapped with hard edges (nearest-neighbour filtering, no bilinear/trilinear/blur). 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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Havoc 1y ago

Love the name. They should keep it

rckt 1y ago

> Wishlist and follow dev updates 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.

jsmailes 1y ago

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.

fishbacon 1y ago

Looks amazing. 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/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2419670/Eclipsium/

the-kenny 1y ago

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.

Klaster_1 1y ago
Any game you'd recommend where that's not true?

davedx 1y ago

"3D pixel art" = a 3D engine running in a lower resolution? It looks like 320x200

mfro 1y ago
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.
- layer8 1y ago
  Downscaled 3D doesn’t create such a stable pixel structure across movements.
  - mfro 1y ago
    Depends on the technique used. Temporal methods don’t look this way but standard downscaling can.
    - layer8 1y ago
      I don’t really see how. What do you mean by “temporal methods”?
      - mfro 1y ago
        By temporal I refer to DLSS, FSR, TSR, etc. In this game's case, I imagine it's not as simple as downscaling, there is probably some shader work involved similar to this: https://youtu.be/Cwh_TpouPfQ https://youtu.be/Cwh_TpouPfQ
        layer8 1y ago
        DLSS, FSR, TSR are for upscaling, not downscaling, so I’m not sure how they would apply anyway. The creator hints a bit at things in this video: https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY?t=2m55s https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY?t=2m55s

Rooster61 1y ago

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.

jdlyga 1y ago

This is everything we imagined point and click games to be as kids.

layer8 1y ago

The creator talks a bit more about it in this video: https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY