I wrote about this as decision I had almost made back in August, the technical challenges alone to make the social VR based co-op shooter were making it increasingly unlikely that I would have time to rework the assets to use lower resolution textures and lower levels of geometry to effectively emulate shooters of the past such as Duke Nukem, well now I am officially saying that the decision has been made, even though it’s been pretty obvious to me for many weeks now.
It’s a hard decision to make but I think it is the right one, the gameplay experience is more important than spending time to get the graphics to look a certain way, if the assets I currently have did not look good then I would probably reconsider but feedback on the look of the game in its current state has been consistently positive. Still, I can always ‘retro’ fit the graphics at a later stage, if you pardon the pun.
I did conduct some research into the best way to create graphics in a 90’s shooter style and at the time couldn’t find much information, the only example in VR being the game ‘Compound’, since then though I have discovered another game that was coming out for Oculus Quest (but has been cancelled by Facebook) called ‘Theta Legion’, again a single player game like ‘Compound’ but going for the same retro style, it looks excellent….
After looking into this game further I found a fantastically comprehensive developer blog for the game, which was originally released on the Oculus Go.
This finally gave me a very comprehensive insight into the most effective way to create objects and textures for a VR game that replicate this retro effect, the answer was surprisingly simple but would actually mean I couldn’t easily repurpose the existing assets I have by simply adding low resolution texture, the best look relies on two principles
- Creating everything out of simple cubes, making objects use the absolute minimum amount of cubes to be a viable representation
- Hand crafting custom low-resolution textures that not only give the object it’s look but also to simulate extra levels of detail that would be seen on a higher poly object
The second point was the biggest revelation for me to read, this actually makes more sense now since my original demo scene that I created in week 1 of this project had low level geometry and very low level textures with no filtering but it still didn’t look quite right, that was because there were no custom painting textures that added the effect of extra geometric detail!
After reading this development blog post recently I feel more justified in deciding to focus on gameplay mechanics and level design towards the deadline instead of trying to shoe-horn in a retro graphics style, I probably would have become quite unstuck and lost a lot of time that could have been spent on other more essential things.
'Boarding Party' VR dev blog 