Low Poly Aesthetics

Have any noticeable game devs lately gone for a PSX-like aesthetic in their games? I don't mean "minimalist" artsy shit like Firewatch, but details like fixed/overhead camera angles, or somewhat detailed textures over different objects. I think this sort of stuff looks really nice, and there's probably largely-untapped potential here. Plus, it probably wouldn't need a particularly skilled modeller, even though you'd probably have to accomodate for that with the textures.

Sorry if I've made any bad assumptions, I don't hang around the agdg threads.

I think there are a few out there yes. But the games seem to not be that great.

Low poly is becoming the new meme artstyle for indies, but just like with the "16-bit" pixel artstyles, they are just using it as an excuse to do less work and don't actually try to make high quality assets.

Pic related

I think he meant Playstation lowpoly. Thats artsy faggot shit.

The best/worst thing about these is that they clearly just mashed polygons randomly and called it a day, whereas PS1 era games tried their level best to make not only figures that would fit an art style but they tried to squeeze as much detail into them as possible to avoid adding too many textures.

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they oughta actually make the games for ps1 first and foremost to make them actually properly look like ps1 games. lesson in optimization as well.

Is the software for making PS1 games ready available? I know the Dreamcast is still developer-friendly, but PlayStation…

Anything with at least 8-bit textures? Haha I hate the "people" who make these games

Sounds good in theory but I'm sure that's just not practical. I'm not a programmer but as long as you actively put any mind at all to the memory consumption of your game, you should probably be alright with something like this. Especially since you shouldn't have to bother with shaders or lighting or anything like that.

I love how the "muh money kikestarter" tears start flying when you point out what REAL low poly WORK looks like. The point is to have good textures to give the illusion of more detail. That shit there is better suited to my desktop backgrounds.

This is the good shit, at least building wise.

No, because with their nostalgia goggles people forgot what actual PS1 graphics look like. Show them early 00s games and they think it's PS1.

That being said I'd like low poly graphics being used for a practical reason, like having a lot of shit on the screen at once.

That's exactly why Katamari Damacy looks the way it does, to render a ridiculously huge amount of objects.

How does one learn to make textures of that caliber? I've tried, god knows I've tried, but I simply cannot into textures.

Yep it's not a new concept.

I'd be down for example for an open world game with the graphical quality of GTA San Andreas, but a shitload of content and a huge world that is handcrafted and isn't just generic wilderness or procedural crap.

What the fuck? That's not even low poly.

This shit is wizardry

A large part isn't how many polys you use but how you use them.
I was shocked to find out that Mario's model in SM64DS has less polygons than his original model from Super Mario 64.

I fucking hate this shit so much. It reminds me of unfinished areas and I want it to fucking end.

You ever notice how there aren't any textures on these, it's always just a solid color?
Why?

That is pretty impressive.

Because they're lazy as fuck. Texturing requires as much if not more talent than just throwing polygons together.

Yeah, textures are the real shit. You can make a couple triangles look like anything you want if you know how to texture well.

I have so many vague ideas about games I want to make but I have no clue how to design a good level.

Check out Power Drill Massacre if you like horror games. It's free.

Replaying the Cataclysm or (((Emergence))) really made me appreciate some of the models.

To be fair, 5th gen games tended to avoid textures if it was possible, especially on N64. The issue with that shit though is that it doesn't rook retro at all.

The problem is they're putting retro geometry into modern engines with things like ambient occlusion, proper shadows, etc. It just doesn't look right.

But like all indie-fags, they take retro technology and butcher it. Almost all of those "retro" indie games didn't suffer from quirks you saw with older retro games. They'd use lighting effects that weren't possible, have things move more precisely than retro hardware could ever do, etc.

That's what I'm talking about. It's the equivalent of "8/16-bit" games where nothing looks right because it doesn't actually align to a pixel grid of a fixed resolution, and thus has clashing scaling and rotating.

The problem is they're not using "retro geometry" at all, i.e. subdividing models in a way that creates the illusion of greater complexity. They're doing the exact opposite by flagrantly displaying their shitty polycount like it's a badge of honor. It's just the mark of talentless modelers who don't know how to abstract an object in an elegant way that the eye can easily digest.. And they don't use textures. At all, in most cases.

Ambient occlusion and raytraced shadows would only work to improve the visuals of low poly assets created by someone who isn't a retard.

Low-poly is best enjoyed when you forget that you're playing a low-poly game, same with other artstyles like wireframe mimicked with pixels.
Hell, i don't even mind using camera-facing sprites for characters and background decorations while having a 3D overworld as long as it fucking fits well and doesn't look like a jagged graphics lazy project, but the latter is most likely to happen since faggots will play these games on ePSXe with all fancy effects at max and say "oh, so that's how it was meant to look like! i'll make my game look like that!"

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That's some great shit

Good devs in the past were generally aware of their limitations and tried to make the design work with them in harmony. Bad devs made horrible looking games because they failed with the illusion part.
I like Half-Life 1's graphics to this day for example - they were low-tech even back then because GoldSrc was derived from Quake 1 engine, but the devs knew what they were doing with it.

Saturn was a wonderful 2D machine.

On the bright side as soon as you see a game with that kind of artstyle you already know to avoid it like the plague it is.

I am bested, I remember that pack on fpsbanana. Did anyone ever rig it up to work in game?

This series has been on my backlog too long.

Devil daggers goes into that direction, im not sure if its actually very low poly but it does a couple things that remind me of the PSX-era, for example simulating floating point inaccuracy resulting in jitter and a couple other shader tricks.