A digital artist has created a stylish mockup of a roguelike (maybe even a Roguelike) which looks like printed screenshots in a magazine. It’s a pretty little thing, though I should stress it is only a mockup to demonstrate a shader, not an actual game. But still, come, watch.
Halftone roguelike. pic.twitter.com/aAIND9deFT
— Mrmo Tarius (@MrmoTarius) May 19, 2022
That’s neat. It isn’t a game. It really isn’t a game, and it doesn’t seem it ever will be, but it’s neat to look at and that’s good enough.
It’s the work of Mrmo Tarius, created to demonstrate their fancy new halftone shader for Blender, which gives computer graphics the effect of being printed using the halftone process (which uses patterns of dots to trick the eye). In a Twitter thread, they explained more about the process and shared more images. But it really isn’t a game. The starting point was made in lvllvl, a browser-based tool for creating pictures using character sets.
This is the actual input image texture 🙂 pic.twitter.com/r9cDneDaCQ
— Mrmo Tarius (@MrmoTarius) May 19, 2022
I think magazines are an interesting untapped nostalgic aesthetic. Sure, loads of devs are making games which look like they’re from decades prior, but what about those of us whose experiences with those ancient games came mostly through screenshots? When I could afford to buy a new game, I’d spend hours in Electronics Boutique staring at the low-resolution screenshots printed on boxes before picking a budget re-release compilation from the revolving display stand. The rest of the time, I’d just read magazines, poring over the pixels degraded into dots and combining those with the writer’s description to imagine what a game might be like.
So if a game can recreate that experience, combined with the torchlight of me trying to read in bed without getting busted, that would be grand. Thanks in advance! Your pal, Alice.
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