So it's a day before the jam I decided to get carried away with setting up the engine stuff of how the game will be rendered and what restrictions I'll be going for. I'll be using Godot for this as usual and will probably go for a simple first person game. However I might make it a play different mini games to collect the stuff sort of thing. We'll see how it goes.
I threw in some 3D primitives and started lowering the resolution to about 640x360 (this is upscaled to 1280x720), so basically 480p converted into a 16:9 ratio. I decided to just go for a Dreamcast/PS2 look, somewhere between there. I had a hard time finding dreamcast specifications but PS2 was more common place for gamedev topics of "how do I make my unity game look ps2" which will surely increase after the current low poly ps1 fad I'm sure. I wanted to go for a very windows 98/XP wallpaper inbetween with vast empty grass plains and sky as sort of the base scene. Maybe I'll have different areas like a tropical sonic adventure type place or a metro rave city night area. I associate those locations a lot with the y2k era for some reason.
Phantasy Star Online is probably peak y2k aesthetics with its optimistic cyberspace lobby mood.
Going back to the PS2, the console has the problem of being just enough to have the bells and whistles of modern 3D capability yet lofi enough to gain the "this looks it came from the ps2 era" graphics insult shorthand. Aside from the lack of power compared to current consoles, it's only really missing normal maps, pixel shader capability and real-time lighting solutions. It has very compressed textures compared to the dreamcast but a stronger cpu for things like polygons. What's surprising about the dreamcast is looking at how big the source textures are, though it still had to compress it down during realtime. Dreamcast won out in terms of fidelity but PS2 still had decent enough horsepower to go for open world games or display high polycounts like the environments in rachet and clank. Though from a lay person perspective I think it's just hard to recognize the PS2 look and just assuming a game could be a low budget indie game. The resolution and the overly compressed textures (sometimes bumped down to even 64x64) are the only major tell, but it might still be mistaken for a groddy underpolished asset flip 3D game. At the same time I still want to go for the launch ps2 era, right when developers were still grappling with the console's power.
Though ultimately I think I want the game to make you feel like you're trapped in the start up boot sequence of a y2k console. Like if the Dreamcast start up noise just kept going and you were in this vast bright white void. The PS2 start up sounds were a bit harrowing and kinda horrific but still had this sinking aquatic feeling. My composer friend Cowberry (who I worked with in the last cover jam) came up with a bunch of 20 second sound ideas with how the game should sound like:
Idea 9
Idea 2
Feel like Y2K aesthetics was where digital sound was getting to the point where it was starting to shed the cheesy MIDI sound in favor of something that made you feel like you were being transported somewhere. Very holistic and bright I guess. While there will probably be diegetic rave drumloop tracks I'd like to explore the slow aquatic ambient type of sound. Speaking of aquatic:
I threw in a pretty basic water shader that uses noise for a scrolling normal map and a bit of a fresnel highlight that responds to the light direction. Looking into it the PS2 wasn't exactly capable of those technicalities. It had rudimentary shader magic enough to distort and create interesting ripples. But I think gamecube/xbox era is where the fancier possibilities came into play. However this does look enough to match that liquidy cgi aesthetic that y2k commercials and music videos have so I'm going to prioritize that look above all else aka I'm too lazy to make my shader code period accurate to what the PS2 could actually do. As long as it feels primitive enough for the layperson hyped on nostalgia, it's probably ok.
That's it for today, next update I'll start working on maybbeeee the menu/ui/graphic design. Who knows.