Caption about the
iymage goes in
hereCaption about the
iymage goes in
here“So I kind of just stumbled into
slowly adding more modern
rendering techniques, and I just got
to a point where I said, ‘OK, screw it.
I’ll just throw it all in, but try and
ground it in a retro look, or I guess
it’s kind of cringy, but ‘retro plus’, to
find a nice balance of modern and old
technology.’” Prebble has spent the
best part of a decade picking which
assets to update. “It’s like, this
headset doesn’t look too great. I
could go back and bring it up to
scratch, but I don’t want to polish it
too much and detract from the
original look of the game.”KILL SWITCH
One ironic outcome is that Overkill
currently requires quite a ‘hefty’ PC.
But it does accommodate players
who want to excise the modern
flourishes and experience something
like Prebble’s original, heavilyrule-bound retro prototype. “I have
seen a lot of people run the demo on
low settings, and some people look at
that and say it’s a retro game, it’s
supposed to look chunky. I kind of
agree with that. Originally Turbo
Overkill had a pixelation filter in it,
which is something I used to play
with all the time, just because I liked
the look of, you know, low resolution
graphics.”
Prebble is considering a lo-fi
version for ‘potato PCs’, following on
from the lo-fi options he made for his
Doom mod Total Chaos, which
“basically downgraded all the
textures and stripped out a lot of
shaders and all our models had half
the polygons. That’s something I’d
love to do for Turbo, but it would
only be later in development”.BOXED OFF
There are parallels between low-spec
gaming and demaking, the practice of
remaking a game to run or look as if
it’s running on old hardware. They’re
arguably the same thing – demaking
redefines developing for lower specs
as an art form deserving celebration.
Having spent decades wrestling
various technologies into submission,
Goddard is both fascinated and
repelled by the thought of adapting
new games to platforms such as
Gameboy. “To me it just sounds like
hitting my head with a hammer
non-stop. That doesn’t seem to be
anything enjoyable there from my
point of view, but because [younger
developers haven’t] gone through all
that pain they don’t see it – they find
it fascinating and really intriguing.”TOP: Those lowered
settings are often
more noticeable in
motion than in
screenshots, but on
the whole we were
impressed with how
well a lot of games
hold up.“YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE
TO MAKE REDUCED
POLYGON VERSIONS OF
THINGS ANY MORE”
FEATURE
Low-Spec Gaming
MAXIMUM God of War
Wonderlands