Thank you guys for your kinds words!
Overall there are a few styles clashing with another. The drawn highly pixelated 2D guns (I like the perspective on the guns though), the 3d environment (which is fine IMO, esp. those stonewall texture approach), the static shadow maps and the soft shader flashlight shadowing.
Yes, I can see what you are saying man. I was planning to mix oldschool style with nowadays 'look'. F.e. I was thinking about enabling dynamic shadows from the sprites (spotlight, point lights, sun etc). But then I face a problem with lack of shader programming knowledge. So it looks like this, kind of undone and really rough. Static lights are only there, because they keep that 'shaded' feel on the surfaces, cause when it's all 'flat' it looks really empty to my eye.
Things you could try:
- Have a look at the RTS "8 bit armies" and their models. You could use that approach for guns (but then you'd have to design enemies in that way too, probably more time consuming).
I'll take a look at that game, never hear of it before.
- Have the flashlight shader put out pixelated shadows, like on an 8 step gradient (that is use the current shadow value and transform it into that).
- Disable static shadow maps (thus flat shadowing only), maybe even all dynamic shader based but pixelated lighting could work out fine and cool.
I would actually love to do this things and I would really like to have pixelated shadows out of the flashlight (and other lights too!), but as I'm not good at shaders, I can't. About soft shader flashlight, I guess I could 'fix' this by having a smaller (low res) defuse map for the flashlight. As it's just projected over the surface, pixelated bmap would help I think. I would like to mix oldschool with nowadays modern graphics like developers did in this game:
Legend of Dungeon Gameplay Levels 1-15 What are you planning regarding content creation? Fixed levels like Doom 1 or randomly/ procedurally generated levels maybe (with optional loot/ grinding/ exp)?
I'm planning to create 'fixed levels', and for a reason. The main goal is to beat the level as fast as you can while finding all secrets, collecting all items and killing all enemies, so having a good practice on the same level could be challenging. But I see that nowadays procedurally generated games are more popular.. So I guess I'll have to think again about the main concept. To stick to my original idea with fixed levels, or move on with nowadays stream/tide.
Thank you for very nice tips!
Best regards!
