This looks really cool and I will doubtless play, if it ever comes out. Unfortunately I get Hytale vibes from this website. I don't understand the point of announcing such a project, not least with such an elaborate landing page, so early in development.

I appreciate the work but as someone who grew up playing these games and quake and blood and all those novalogic titles, it was never about the graphics. They were just fun.

In a sense the pastiche nostalgia reminds me of the 80s retro boom. It is way over the top to the degree that nothing back then looked or sounded like that. It was more low key and subdued.

I like the pixelated look, but that's probably nostalgia. Presumably this effect was achieved using a shader rather than an old school software renderer like old-school Quake and Half-Life (the last games I remember where you could switch between OpenGL and "software renderer")

"Early alpha trailer"

For that reason, I'm out.

this seems to be inspired by the extremely viral ai-generated video:

https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1947024682118488116

I believe the concept for this project is an AI-generated pixel art GIF that went very viral on X a few months ago:

https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1947024682118488116

I am not sure this project is capturing the strangely compelling sense of scale shown in that GIF, but it's nice to see someone taking a shot at it.

Makes me think of the voxel displacement renderer ( https://blog.danielschroeder.me/blog/voxel-displacement-mode... ) from a year ago.

I had an idea a little back about using hand-drawn mipmaps (.5x, 1x, 2x, etc) scales for sprites, with some method for nearest neighbor, (e.g. with a 3x scale taking pixels from the 2x and the 4x scale). I imagined I wasn't the first to have that idea, but it was just a passing thought. I wonder if OP is doing anything like that?

Anyways, very neat.