Once I had decided that I would be making a game in first person 3D, I knew very soon that I wanted to make something in the Raw 3D look of the mid to late 90s like the Quake engine or the PlayStation. But now that I have started making character models and textures in Blender, I really had to made concrete decisions about how much geometry would be on characters and environment objects, what character faces should look like, and how many pixels a texture should have per one meter of surface.

(Humanoid limbs have seven segments. Hands are cubes without fingers. Cylinders have 12 faces. Faces are a static texture on flat geometry. And 128 pixels per meter.)

The first choice I had to make for a visual style is do I want something in the style of Quake or in the style of Unreal. Unreal also has a really pleasant visual style, but in the end it became clear that it really has to be Quake. While the game Quake itself does have a visual design style that isn’t really isn’t offering anything that would make for a useful reference for any assets in Iridium Moons, I really like the amount of fine grain detail on the textures that really pops out when texture filtering is disabled. And the pixel density on environment textures feels like just the right resolution for me. Quake also has a crisp sharpness to everything that PS1 games generally don’t have. I think it’s the lack of dithering, which I also won’t be using for Iridium Moons.

The other main game that stands out as one of the best looking Raw 3D games with fantastic looking unfiltered textures is Metal Gear Solid. But that game is designed to be seen from a quite high up top down perspective, and the models and textures designed for that in mind, which is quite different from a very close up first person view. So I am going for a higher pixel density on textures, somewhat more polygons on character models, and more small environment clutter objects on tables and shelves. I really like the approach to faces, which is flat heads with a texture that is so low resolution that you can’t actually make out any details on any features. I always hated drawing faces and having to deal with eyes and mouths, and Metal Gear Solid has a style that gets around that while still being consistent with the overall aesthetic. The use of color in this game is really nice, and I just love the use of lighting in the environments, which is something hope to be able to somewhat emulate. I am not going to simulate any kind of graphics artifacts caused by the PS1 hardware, because that’s just a silly gimmick.

A better example of great looking PS1 graphics that are closer to what you would see in first person view is the Syphon Filter series. I feel Syphon Filter makes for a great reference for modelling and texturing characters. I also quite like the character animations, which I think are a bit more smooth with less stiff body posture than in Metal Gear Solid, but still have some of the low-fidelity jitter going on. I also definitely want those transparent pixelated fire sprites for all my fire effects. While the level geometry and environmental decoration is extremely sparse in Syphon Filter, it’s use of darkness and colored light looks really cool to me.

A more recent game that uses a similar visual design but isn’t limited by 30 year old hardware is Peripeteia. As with Quake, the design aesthetic of Peripeteia is very different than what I am going for with Iridium Moons. But I really like how it uses modern computing power to make use of space and scale with its environment. Somewhat unreasonably sized buildings and natural features is something that I think will serve the overall tone of Iridium Moons quite well. I also like how the level geometry is not only big cubes arranged on a square grid but with much more pillars, pipes, and stairs and some environmental objects.

I am also very intrigued by the level of detail seen in the trailers for Compound Fracture, which might be the only thing we’ll ever get of the game. There is considerably more going on in the environment than in the PS1 games or Peripeteia and I think this might perhaps be the perfect level of texture detail, environmental objects, and lighting for me. It would significantly increase the work time on asset creation and I’m not even sure if I will be able to pull this of. But if I could get there one day, that would be really cool. Again, the tone and aesthetic here are completely different than the intended style of Iridium Moons.

Everything I said about Peripeteia and Compound Fracture goes double for Beta Decay. I love the graphics of this game. The level of detail here is probably too high for what I’ll be able to achieve. But having these graphics in bright sunset colors would be an absolute dream come true for me. And I’m absolutely going to combine PS1 style textures with real time dynamic lighting. With tiny texture files, tiny polygon counts, and probably a very limited use of shaders, I think it should still be able to run on a total potato of a computer.