Jitter when the camera slides left and right means he should keep it in one spot and offset the screen. I.e., don’t move the camera - move the graphics. Have some X/Y value that gets added to all block positions, that frame. Then any visible gaps between tiles would at least stay put.
The artistic solution to those gaps is to make hidden faces the same color as the top face. Anywhere a cube touches a cube, the sides that meet should not be shaded.
The artistic non-solution is to give each top face an outline so that all looks like a deliberate grid. Like the surface is tiled the way a kitchen is tiled.
An artistic abuse is that blocks could be oriented freely. Any 1x1 pillar of cubes can be stacked funny. Especially if the engine makes non-grid-aligned tiles cheap. Then you could do a ziggurat where every level spirals upward. Admittedly, that would make collision a pain. Even player movement seems to be gridded.
“They say the old caretaker of this place went absolutely crazy. Chopped up his entire staff. Of robots. All of them robots. They say at night you can still hear the screams. Of their replicas. All of them functionally indistinguishable from the originals. No memory of the incident. Nobody knows what they’re screaming about. Absolutely terrifying. Though obviously not paranormal in any meaningful way.”
A similar move I’d like to see, instead of some shrunken emulator gizmo, is a straight re-release of the GBC or GBA. They’re low-bullshit entertainment, with the distinction of being standalone portable devices. And like the 2600 (and to a lesser extent 7800) people still make new games for them. Hell, I made one last month.
That’s not damning. That’s how franchises work. Sequels come with an audience built-in, so they can pull a bigger budget on expected sales and spend less of it on marketing.
How recently was this not true?
Seriously. Ten-ish years ago, the big releases were Halo, Elder Scrolls, GTA, Bioshock, Deus Ex, Xcom, Zelda. If not all ten years old at that point - spiritual successors to much older games. Twenty years ago, the big releases were Tony Hawk, Mario Kart, Prince of Persia, Ninja Gaiden, Sonic… Elder Scrolls, GTA, Zelda. Thirty years ago, when home video games were just barely fifteen years old, half the big names were either direct sequels or media adaptations, and most would become long-running franchises. Shockingly, one title was already a decade-old franchise: Super Bomberman.
Now consider the games he’s talking about, today. Halo’s not on that list anymore. It’s there. But it’s not big. Deus Ex is dead again. The specific aforementioned Tony Hawk game killed Tony Hawk games. Prince of Persia and Ninja Gaiden came and went. GTA and the Elder Scrolls haven’t released a game since, technically speaking.
Meanwhile the last two Zelda games are a more radical departure than anything since that awkward NES sidescroller. FromSoft keeps doing FromSoft stuff, but that’s more of a genre than a franchise. Baldur’s Gate III is a sequel twenty-three years later, in a genre that was niche then and niche-er since. There’s big-budget remakes of stuff from the PS1 / PS2 era, but they’re practically brand-new games. Tony Hawk, ironically, less so.
Some of the big-ass games ten years from now will be surprise hits and slow-burn successes from the last few years. Some games will get a quality-bump sequel that takes off, and then if we’re being brutally honest, a publisher like Microsoft will squeeze the life out of the studio by forcing them to crank out more of that until they hate everything. And people in 2033 will complain on probably-not-Lemmy that Sea Of Stars V is such a tired rehash after the highs of IV, and why does nothing new ever come along?
Whose fault is that, guys? Were those numbers placed on you by a witch’s curse? No. You spent $100M on one game, it made $300M, so you spend $200M on the next game. Games didn’t get twice as hard to make, between those decisions. They didn’t require twice as many people or twice as much time. You’re just treating them like a factory where more capital in means more revenue out.
The original Doom was made in nine months by a team that fits in an elevator. Yeah, it’s simpler than modern games, but they had to make the nearly-unprecedented engine and all their own tools as they went. It’s not like anything’s harder, now. People have basically recreated that seminal title as solo one-week game jam projects. A modern handful of professional computer nerds can pick from a handful of modern high-end toolchains and start banging out content, today.
If the market for video games only supported six-digit budgets - there would still be video games. Big ones, fancy ones, creative ones, whatever. Would they be the spectacles that currently get advertised to death? Nope. But they also wouldn’t produce as many unstable bug-fests as those sprawling mega-projects. Nor would they be announced in 1999, previewed in 2006, delayed in 2017, and launched to middling reviews in 2025.
Studios that aren’t injected with obscene capital and forced to deliver “AAA” money-trees tend to shoot their shot and move on to the next game. That’s how they survived and grew as plucky little private affairs, before some publishers swallowed them whole and turned them into a sequel factory for their breakout hit.
If your games cost too much money to fail, stop giving them more money.
Anything negative about the Russian government is probably accurate and deserved. Extending that to the Russian people is iffy at best.
And remember this game is rather explicitly fifty years in the future, so anything current will be as relevant as Vietnam references are today. Not even counting the alternate history and corporatocracy of the setting.