Sword of Moonlight > Projects, demos, and games Information

Modern ps1 games

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Verdite:
I wrote a long post about this topic, but it got lost somehow when I hit an F key by accident. I didn't post it.

To summarize my reason for posting...
PS1 games have just the right level of detail to allow us to perceive what we are seeing, while subconsciously perceiving the other, missing details. Despite low levels of detail, PS1 games have had bigger impacts on our generation (referring to mine and HolyDivers) of gamers. I'd like to share some games made recently. When I see these games, I feel a lot more atmosphere and interest, in comparison to modern games.

Aka Manto (KF style)


Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/tXJmJcozwHc


Sauna 2000 (Horror)
Actually terrifying.


Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/9td6u9rjIdY

Holey Moley:

--- Quote ---I wrote a long post about this topic, but it got lost somehow when I hit an F key by accident. I didn't post it.
--- End quote ---

Do you mean in this forum's compose page? I've been there, but luckily not in a very, very long time. I always do Ctrl+A Ctrl+C habitually. A "function" key?

On-topic: I see a lot of these kinds of projects recommended as YouTube videos. I'm surprised there are so many horror games. It's a genre I'm not really interested in, since it's inherently puerile to my mind. (I have to be obsessively selective about how I spend my time these days.)

I don't like how these games try to recreate glitches ("PS1 style") and they don't even mimic the PS accurately either. I know low-poly is best and that boils down to what's called level-of-detail. It seems that no game has yet to solve this problem, colloquially called pop-in, and I think that no compromise is worth having this problem in your game.

With low-poly you can use the same models for a relatively good draw distance before your polygons become so small on screen that they will result in overdraw artifacts. Level-of-detail isn't an optional thing. If you want super dense polygons like modern commercial games have then you have to deal with it somehow, and those games all suffer pop-in as a result.

I wonder sometime if I could solve pop-in with SOM (where no one else can) but I think for the time being it's best for independent artists to keep to low-poly work and not waste time with anything else.

Lastly, I'm very skeptical of normal-maps and caution against specular lighting in games because it's very hard to get right and fake specular always looks better. I think our brains understand specular lighting effects and are evolved to tune them out, but there are many things our brains can do in real life that doesn't work on screens. There are a large class of issues games have that movies don't simply because you move very differently in a game than how the camera moves in a movie, and capturing light is much softer than drawing triangles.

This is part of the reason I think VR with SOM is very valuable even though I'm not sure it's there for play yet... I know with VR artists can see their levels and models much better and identify problems that you don't consciously notice on the screen but probably do have unconscious effects.

Finally, to me 2D games almost always seem to have a juvenile appearance. This could just be me, but I look at them like a kid's toy box. There is just no way to overcome this effect. The best way I see is to go back to 8-bit 2D which takes on for me a more pop-art feel. Today if I have to say what is more artistic between 8-bit and 16-bit I go with the 8-bit generation. And the earlier games that are 1-bit or weird limited VESA palettes somehow seem more artistic yet. With 3D on the other hand, I believe you can make art that doesn't appear juvenile, you can make something like modern art that dominated the 20th century. King's Field is an example of art that looks more like sculpture and its repetitive textures are actually very valuable to this effect, because modern art values repetition, but also they're more realistic because they are abstract representations, whereas if you were to vary the same textures so that they are not strictly repetitive, well then you just notice the duplicate instances instead. I think the former is least intrusive.

P.S. For the record I set aside this board for showcasing SOM projects, but rules are made to be broken I guess :updown:

Edited: In case anyone wonders, the reason I've written so much is Verdite (or anyone) only posts here once a year :higgins:

Holey Moley:

--- Quote from: Verdite on March 13, 2020, 03:07:52 PM ---Sauna 2000 (Horror)
Actually terrifying.


Gameplay video: https://youtu.be/9td6u9rjIdY
--- End quote ---

The insanity this represents pales in comparison to the democrats in my country nominating a senile old man to save us from another senile old man who everyone agrees is the least qualified person alive to be president. I really can't see the purpose. I really wish anyone would make straight games :CecilD_crouch:

mosspunch:

--- Quote from: Verdite on March 13, 2020, 03:07:52 PM ---PS1 games have just the right level of detail to allow us to perceive what we are seeing, while subconsciously perceiving the other, missing details. Despite low levels of detail, PS1 games have had bigger impacts on our generation (referring to mine and HolyDivers) of gamers. I'd like to share some games made recently. When I see these games, I feel a lot more atmosphere and interest, in comparison to modern games.

--- End quote ---

Personally, I couldn't agree with you more. This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. There seems to be a bit of a resurgence in love for PS1 era games. Especially the survival horror genre. Projects like Back in 1995 and the Haunted PS1 Demo Disk. Not to mention the love some people are showing for tank controls in Dreams. This already highlights the soft spot people have for PS1 immersion. Because without it a horror game is doomed.

There's something about the graphics of the PS1 that evokes a kind of magic. I remember the time when the PS1 was king. When games like Silent Hill and Parasite Eve came out. They blew people away. They weren't lookers. They had atmosphere. Unparalleled atmosphere and mood. Probably because we had to use our imagination to fill in the details that weren't there as you say. It works like a book I think. Books are so immersive because we have they rely on our imaginations. Ever read a truly great horror novel? It's terrifying. 

I also feel that something special is missing in modern games. Much of the mystery is gone.

Just my two cents.

Thanks for sharing those vids of Aka Manto and Sauna 2000. Had no idea.

Holey Moley:
TBH my impression is more like young people are discovering PS games are different from the games they grew up with and young people (for some reason) have an obsession with glitches in games and I think the glitchy look of these games are probably enabled by different effects with the major game engines (Unreal and Unity) because they're not really emulating PlayStation and mix in various modern day effects... and I think that horror as a genre is popular in these games for the same reasons... which are glitchy demos and horror attract views on YouTube and are easy to implement by tinkerers, as opposed to solid drama and art direction.

There is definitely a strong argument for clear visuals helping to make games playable because I think in a movie you have to take in information from a fixed perspective but in a game you have to take it in from everywhere at once, and so if you don't reduce that bandwidth for the player it turns every game into a muddy bullet hell and I think that's what the big "cinematic" games are really struggling with to reconcile with their over-the-top visions for what video games should be. My sense has always been that games succeed when they lean into abstraction, but the history of video games has been to pull away from abstraction as fast as their legs can carry them, so I feel like the medium itself remains mostly unplumbed and so does the technology because there are so many possible technological areas to explore that have long been abandoned and forgotten because of how the culture that pushes the envelope of the technology really has a very limited vision and can't perceive anything beyond the immediate horizon and never goes backward mostly out of hubris and group think and peer pressures around what does and doesn't receive attention and applause. A craftsman/technical painter mentality is needed; what's needed is to see the video game as a canvas and not as a technological domain like computer hardware.

On the subject of the DIY scene what bothers me most is none of the new games really look like the games of the 20th century. That means they're either not studying those games or believe they're doing better than those games or they don't yet have the resources to make games at that level. But it's telling that the new games look different because that means those are esthetics that the old games either rejected or didn't consider.

P.S. I saw a video about Mario64 yesterday (it mentioned a decompiler called Ghidra that might be helpful with SOM) that made me to realize the N64 has a depth-buffer. That's the biggest difference between it and the PlayStation hands down. In fact, that the PS doesn't have a depth-buffer is what makes it the most exotic of triangle rasterizing consoles. That's why in King's Field you get some funky perspective correction and triangles sometimes intersect and sometimes the perspective correction on the edge of the screen goes completely askew. Some emulator extensions surely add a depth-buffer to the mix so you may notice fewer of these kinds of glitches today if everything works well.

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