This is so great. Another fun trick we used in the 90s was palette animation -- by swapping the palette you can create incredibly cool effects at a low runtime cost.

I am not even a noob with game development. I dabbled with Godot a couple years ago and was making a funny weight lifter game, some sorta stat management sim. It was actually pretty fun but I didn't get past some pretty early working versions.

I thought I could really level up with Claude and I started working on a boxing game. It's been a total disaster. .·°՞(˃ ᗜ ˂)՞°·.

As a fellow 3d-engine-with-foolishly-unreasonable-constraints developer, I love the detail in the explanations here and seeing the process you went through.

This is terrific. I love reading about the creative process involved in a project like this, finding cool solutions to self-imposed boundaries.

I think the mix of highly rational reasoning and "it just feels right" is a killer combo too, it gives a rigorous basis for a lot of the decisions made, while also allowing for a strongly personal aesthetic to emerge. Very cool indeed.

I'm tinkering with a voxel space rendering tech demo as a PlayStation homebrew. After one weekend of work I'm getting decent results (like, 10-15 FPS) and I've yet to use the DMA, the GTE or even polylines primitives.

It's refreshing to dust up trigonometry and good old low-level optimization tricks. When the scratchbuffer has 1 KiB and the stack can only use a fraction of that, it makes me realize how spoiled I'm at work with the microcontrollers we have, with threads being allocated 8 KiB of stack and backtraces with over 50 functions of C++ templates on it.

>> What this actually means is, the constraints I have foolishly imposed upon myself are as follows....

Those kind of constraints can lead to increased creativity, and can also influence the overall style of a game. It's part of the reason early 80's arcade games had so much diversity.

For some reason I irrationally like the posterization effect that's created when something is darkened to almost zero.

I respect the amount of work that goes into projects like this; I can't wait to be able to play it.

A great writeup of excellent work!

The flight simulator / magic carpet easter egg in Microsoft Excel 97 used that same shaded-colormap palette trick, plus some dithering:

https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg https://rezmason.github.io/excel_97_egg/about.html

I'm impressed by your sprite pipeline and gibs animations. Your attention to detail and navigation of constraints have really paid off, I can't wait to play this sometime

Consider a premium, boxed version. I would buy it. And I think a lot other would. Maybe try a kickstarter to see how many are interested?