Basically it allows me to work on the big picture without having to waste time on the tiny details current gen games require. Going with camera facing 2D sprites for a lot of the content has been a huge time saver for me, it allows me to create a lot of content in little time. Sprites don’t need to be modeled, unwrapped, textured, rigged, etc! Especially for creating the enemies this approach helped me a lot. I actually took inspiration from how iD Software made characters on the original doom, by basically creating these awesome clay and latex models, and photographing them from different angles. It took this exact same approach for my characters, but did it all digitally with modern tools, sculpting them in ZBrush and “photographing” them in 3D software!

Techniques like this, of course, drives the style into a very retro direction and getting content out fast like this allows me to focus on what I consider a very big pillar of the game’s visual style: Great visual readability through color and lighting!

Mixing Old School Style With Modern Tricks

What I’m doing in GIBHARD is not treating the old school elements as old school. The game can very much be considered current gen as I’m making full use of realtime lighting and shaders. For example almost all sprites have normal maps attached to them, which actually light them as if they were a 3D object and makes them feel natural in the environment! There was of course a lot of tweaking involved to get the balance just right but I think I got a good grasp on it by now. In the end pixels are pixels, whether it’s next-gen or retro. If you author the content correctly, you can light it correctly and create whatever effects you want. It’s been a lot of fun trying out modern techniques like normal maps and volumetric noise shaders, and applying them on a retro aesthetic!