I really loved that article. Creating games always seemed so daunting to me since I don't know a lot about how it's done, there are so many different processes involved. The solutions described here are so satisfyingly compact and so easy to understand given the simple constraints, and yet they produce an actual game that looks nice.

Much respect -- at first glance when I saw the animated gif I thought this was just a project making assets from scratch for an existing game engine (e.g. Doom or Wolf 3D) but then I realize it's creating all the game code from scratch too! (But using similar techniques from the old days). Amazing work.

Maybe the recent final update to Destiny has already taken over my brain but if Marko is a Destiny fan, he has a great GitHub username.

This is an extremely detailed article on every level and I can’t wait to deep dive into it. Marko really nailed the “old” look but it still looks fresh and new.

Really cool. It's also something LLM's are ridiculously bad at, so you kinda have to do it properly.

In the final video, it looks like the destructible vases take several shots to destroy. IMO, they should only take one. Real life vases only take one, so requiring more makes the gun feel weak. It seems to be cosmetic anyway, so there's no game balance reason to require more.

If there's enough room, you could add special palette indexes that stay constant or diminish more slowly with distance. To give a glow effect for lights, torches, etc. I always appreciated this effect in Quake.

EDIT: Oh nevermind. I guess brightmaps are more flexible.

> We then choose the number of shade levels (32 in my case) meaning each color needs 31 darker variants

I suggest to use not only darker variants, but also brighter ones - for bright map areas and maybe for some lighting effects like flashlight.

As a side note, the visual style in the game reminds me a lot of Exhumed / Powerslave :-).

Looks really cool, please release episode 1 as shareware! (Or a demo on Steam works too)

This game looks great I really like the style it is inspiring.

The author seems to consider open-sourcing the engine, I would also be interested in the mentioned scripts for asset creation. Those scripts would make a great toolset for asset creation in this style.