You mentioned that you don’t care for “actively retro graphics” is there a reason why? Weren’t you making a Thief successor with retro graphics while back?
This is presumably in reference to this tweet:
And I was, yeah! Back in like, 2014-2016 I was making a pretty cool stealth game that I wound up having to cancel for funding-related reasons beyond my control. Initially it was using pixelated low-res photosourced textures, and then later I swapped to another style, befores and afters below. I guess I have a complex-ish relationship with “retro graphics”, which means many things.
Before that, I was also doing a first person adventure game thing in a retro style:
I knocked this off because, while I thought it looked pretty cool, I didn’t think it was really letting me do anything I couldn’t do better and easier in a less idiosyncratic style. I realised it was not particularly harder anymore to do things at higher fidelity, and those were approaches I found more interesting. Pixelated textures and low-poly models as a Style was also ceasing to stand out as interesting at the time, and it’s now hard to imagine it ever did. A lot of folks seemed to be reaching for retro graphics of one type or another as a cheap nostalgia grab. If you take offense at this, you’re probably not who I mean – of course a lot of folks do high-effort and beautiful work in this genre all the time.
I like lo-fi more as a developer than I do as a player. It’s impressionistic and easy to play with, you can have a lot of fun. But I hate it when it’s used in a low-effort way, and it’s tied in with a bunch of nostalgia that I don’t feel, and there’s a lot of overlap between those two things. I’m nostalgic for a lot of things, but not for video game graphics. I feel like low-fidelity graphics need not be “retro”. I don’t like getting my presumed childhood memories appealed to, it seems shallow. You could put something that looks like Metal Gear Solid out today, and that wouldn’t have to be nostalgic or retro, it’s just great work with a great look. So if something’s trying to Evoke The Fucking Snes or whatever, or getting hung up on texel densities (which nobody did at the time) or vertex wobble (an empty technological happenstance) it puts me off. It smells underconfident to me. Do your shit and just let it be your shit, you don’t have to hook into some worshipful cargo cult energy.
And, you know, if that’s not what you’re doing, assume this post isn’t about you and relax, it’s cool, we’re all cool here
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