Having worked on graphics programming for more than a decade, I still didn't pick on that when I played the game. Considering the overall visual language of the game, I'd say it's 100 hours well spent.
Could have easily published this at SIGGRAPH under temporal coherence for non-photorealistic rendering.
I definitely noticed the dithering stability as I was panning around the scenes but would have never guessed that so much had gone into making it so; I’ll appreciate it a lot more now, having ingested this writeup.
For people who are unaware "Return of the Obra Dinn" and "Papers, Please" are both games by Lucas Pope and they are both considered absolute classics and have won multiple awards. Well worth checking out even if you don't consider yourself a typical game-enjoyer. They are not typical games.
"Papers, Please" is a masterpiece. Obra Dinn I must have made some mistake, because it stopped giving me clues after way too few stories to match anything else.
Once it starts raining you have access to all the bodies you need on the ship. Rewatch every flashback and take notes. Details really matter, and those flashbacks are crime scenes that need to be studied fully. Pay special attention to clips in quick succession, as a clue from another flashback may show the means of death or the killer.
>Details really matter, and those flashbacks are crime scenes that need to be studied fully.
This is really what the game is all about. It's amazing when you're going through a scene for the 10th time and pick up on a huge clue that's been hiding in plain sight all that time.
I’m quite fond of watching Let’s Plays of Obra Dinn (it’s the closest I can get to experiencing it for the first time again), and there is a fundamental mistake I see happening over and over: people not getting the rules the game plays by.
First off, the game is tough but fair. I’ve seen a lot of people say out loud what the correct solution is, but not punch it in because the game could be tricking them. In fact, the game would rather give you a hard puzzle and help you solve it rather than giving you an easy puzzle and trick you away from the solution.
Second, the game does a a neat trick of using very contrived game-y mechanics (the magic of the pocket watch) to present information, but only to enable that information following fairly natural real world logic, rather than puzzle game logic. People are unexceptional — they hang out with their peers, use more or less familiar language depending on who they’re talking to, stick to their jobs unless shit is hitting the fan (and even then, their job informs how they react).
I can't tell you how much I _loved_ that accents from the voice actors were a part of it. It was the first time I truly felt like a _detective_ in a video game, stuck piecing together whatever I could from a painstaking analysis of the details in front of me.
That being said, I got stuck and brute forced my way to one or two solves, only to find out at the very end (talking to a friend who completed it) that I had missed a crucial and very helpful detail. Made it obvious that's why I was stuck trying to brute force, which was deeply unpleasant by design: the triple-match made that very tricky and only once I got the search set down a lot.
I had to make a few educated guesses of identities towards the end of the game - I think among the last 5 or so people. Now I am wondering which clues I missed.
If it was "who are all these topmen" then you are supposed to notice the differences in the shoes sticking out of numbered hammocks and use that to put together with the few times they are involved in a memory while awake.
There were some I found really hard, and required a lot of backtracking, ie watching "other" scenes but picking up who was there in the background and such.
I might have had a couple of lets say educated guesses, but the rest was hard work piecing together details.
Easily one of my favorite games ever, and I've been playing for almost 40 year now.
I definitely brute-forced my way through significant portions of Obra Dinn, but the fact that you can do that at all (and it's not TOO onerous) is nice.
Papers, Please is an all time favorite of mine. I made flash cards to remember key bits of information and drilled on them to improve my review skills. Not many games would have me doing that. Never played Obra Dinn because the art style didn’t appeal to me. That said, if you like mystery games, check out Curse of the Golden Idol. It’s adjacent to these games from a creative standpoint and a lot of fun.
He also did an interview on the playdate podcast, which was super fun. One of those little tidbits that reminds you why it can be so easy to fall in love with programming.
Harsh 1-bit dithering is such an interesting topic - even in 2d there are multiple ways of doing it, each with trade-offs and advantages.
It is amazing to me that something that was so integral to the 80s computing experience is now actually quite tricky on modern hardware. For my own project[0] I found that it is almost impossible to ensure a one-to-one mapping between offscreen pixels and the canvas provided by the browser.
I still find it funny that my pretty new nVidia card takes several seconds to switch between resolutions while my 35 year old Atari could switch resolution several times per screen refresh. I made a simple game that had color display in low resolution on three quarters of the screen while the bottom had 4 colors and double horizontal resolution to fit more text instead. So resolution change was done 120 times per second without slowing down the cpu much at all.
Well the nvidia would have no trouble doing that at the refresh rate, resolution and colour depth that the atari was using if that was the target. Ataris were great for their time no doubt but to optimise very high frame rate, colour depth and resolution a modern graphics api is doing some setup that requires a bit of time so that the common case works very smoothly after that.
Yes, that is the problem with modern things. Claming to be new and modern but things that used to be instant is getting slower and slower. There was a time when things were still getting faster and faster. I had the privilege to try a normal fixt-line phone a month ago. I had totally forgotten how fast they call and connect after using a modern smartphone for years.
I remember the time when I started with phones. A connection took 10-20 seconds before you heard the tone after dialing the number. And then the AXE (or whatever they vere called) switchboards came. The connection time dropped to just a second or less. Now the connection time depends a lot on how fast your smartphone is. Mine takes several seconds even though it's just a couple of years old.
Yes, we've all become so emotionally invested in the idea of the inevitability of technological progress that we've blinded ourselves to the fact that much of what we experience is a technological regression buried under layers of gleaming chrome. Just because something takes a lot more effort to achieve doesn't inherently mean that it represents progress.
There is nothing about the modern graphics pipeline that absolutely requires mode changes to take seconds. That's literally an eternity in computer time.
At least the refresh interval can now be changed on a frame by frame basis again. Resolution and bith depth changes on the other hand are still take an insane amount of time.
It looks like none of the proposed approaches work well, and the problem seems to be much more complicated that it looks.
I think what might work properly is:
- A "fractal" dither pattern so that it can be zoomed out and in smoothly and is scale invariant
- Doing things in texel space so that both camera movement and object movement works properly
- Doing bilinear filtering (perhaps keeping all samples instead of storing the weighted average) or perhaps supersampled rendering of the dithered pattern, and then using some sort of error diffusion pass in screen space (with a compute shader)
But not actually sure if this works in practice.
If that's not enough, an alternative would be to do things in screen space "naively", then reverse map the screen space rendering to texel space (in a resolution-preserving way), and use the information in texel space on the next frame to create a screen space solution compatible to the one in texel space, map it to texel space, etc., effectively building up the fractal per-texel pattern incrementally at runtime. This might be the best solution but seems very expensive in terms of memory, computation and complexity.
That is wild! It's not every day I get to see a completely new, unique visual effect. Kudos.
I'd love to see a video with vastly slower movement, so I can pay attention to what's actually happening. The fast movement turns it all into a blur (literally).
Went a bit further down the rabbit hole and found the previous devlogs he posted about the topic for anyone interested. [1] [2]
Of note was an upsampling algorithm called Scale2X he talked about. [3] Pretty neat !
One of the best write-ups on dithering that I've seen so far! I worked on the b&w dithering for Return to Dark Castle.
We wanted to use Atkinson dithering, but it was hard to do in a shader because of how neighboring pixel values trickle into each other, and I was super stressed and tired at the time. I don't think it occurred to us to pin the pattern to the offset of the scene, so I think there is twinkling on scrolling levels like the catacombs and helicopter pack. But maybe we did? I wish I could remember. Anyway, kudos!
I recently downloaded it from GOG and tried to play it on a 5K studio display. I wasn't able to get a result that did not blur those beautiful pixels, which is such a shame. Yes, I did go into all those setting menus.
Not at all. There are visible discontinuities that show the underlying geometry. It's also a very different kind of effect to begin with - more resembling print patterns rather than the more pixel-based dithering from older computer graphics.
I don't know what discontinuities you mean. The point about the "print pattern" seems confused. He just made the dots bigger to see them better in a compressed video. I still think this is clearly better, as it is perfectly temporally stable, unlike the Obra Dinn method.
Yeah, I've played hours of Minecraft with my own dithering renderer, but I'm sure going to 1-bit would give me a headache within minutes.
I wonder if rendering the in-game graphics as if they are being shown on a virtual monitor would provide some respite. If the virtual monitor was on a desk with other items, then would give players some place to rest their eyes.
This doesn't use error diffusion but instead a dither pattern (ordered Bayer and blue noise). Not sure why, as error diffusion has better image quality. Compute cost could be a reason.
I think first and foremost, using dither patterns is just a lot more authentic to the old black and white visual style Obra Dinn is emulating. Go on YouTube and watch some clips of Shufflepuck Café or The Manhole and you'll see that it's all hand drawn art specifically designed to be viewed in 1-bit, and it's all based on dither patterns, not error diffusion.
Error diffusion may yield better results for converting photos to lower bit depths, but it also makes very noisy looking images where edges are muddied and shades bleed into each other. Bitmap art of that era used patterns because it gave the artist a lot more control over the look.
The goal here is not to minimize PSNR or anything like that, but to give a clear and aesthetically pleasing image. And the goal of Obra Dinn is to do that while also matching a historical style. And if you look at individual screen caps of the game, you can see just how successful that effort was.
Secondly, error diffusion is nonlocal, which makes it hard to implement efficiently on a GPU. With a dither pattern, you can calculate each pixel individually, which is ideal for a shader. With error diffusion, you might be able to do some kind of wacky exclusive scan approach with multiple passes to squeeze some parallelism out, but its almost certainly going to perform worse than a dither pattern.
Finally, locking error diffusion to the camera like he did with the dither patterns sounds even harder than the already difficult work he did to get to a decent level of temporal coherence. I honestly have no idea how you'd do it, because the idea is just antithetical to the entire concept. If you don't solve that problem, I think the result would not only fail to capture the intended aesthetic, but would also be pretty nauseating to look at.
> I think first and foremost, using dither patterns is just a lot more authentic to the old black and white visual style Obra Dinn is emulating. Go on YouTube and watch some clips of Shufflepuck Café or The Manhole and you'll see that it's all hand drawn art specifically designed to be viewed in 1-bit, and it's all based on dither patterns, not error diffusion.
That's true for ordered dither patterns like Bayer, which Obra Dinn uses for some objects. But the rest uses a blue noise pattern, which stylistically has a "look" similar to error diffusion, but in terms of preserved detail it behaves only as well a Bayer pattern, so not as well as error diffusion.
I think it’s trying to emulate something retro, but make it work for a modern game?
Like 1-bit games were normal back in the day, but those games were mostly still images or something. And it’s an entirely different set of problems to try and make a fully 3D game with only 1 bit color.
This is tech for a modern game (Return of the Obra Dinn) imitating the retro look of old hi-res monochrome games, e.g. for the Mac.
If you haven't played Obra Dinn, you owe it to yourself to play it. The look is retro (sort of, it's actually very smooth) but the gameplay is definitely "modern indie".
Part of the appeal was definitely the retro look, but this is a very-specific retro look that the author worked hard to put into 3D space.
If people tried to make a "retro" to VR games, you'd mostly just get lots of blocky, cheap-looking graphics. But this could really be weird, in a good way.
The modding community did look at it but the first problem was that it's a Unity game built for D3D9 game, which doesn't allow the VR plugin to be dropped in. They did request the developers create a D3D10/11 build to allow that but I'm not sure it ever happened.
Even if it did, VR relies on getting consistent images for each eye for the stereo view, which might be difficult with this style of rendering. It'd be hard to know if it works without trying it!
I don't know, I start feeling off when just watching a video of the game (a little queasy, a bit of a headache). I think that playing it in VR would be a horrible experience.
I literally had no idea so much went into the dithering, my presumption was there was just an off the shelf posterization filter applied.
The end result looks fantastic and managed to give me wild nostalgia for playing games like The Manhole on my friends Macintosh Classic as a kid.
One of my favorite games ever, my wife and I played through it together. I feel like there's not a lot of games you can play with another person these days and playing it like that was a wonderful experience. I would highly recommend playing it with another person if you have the chance.
> I feel like there's not a lot of games you can play with another person these days and playing it like that was a wonderful experience. I would highly recommend playing it with another person if you have the chance.
Absolutely. Shameless self-plug to my list of games for "non-gamers" that I find enjoyable with a friend or significant other: https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games?list=nongamer . The first of the list is ...... Return of the Obra Dinn ^^.
A lot of great stuff on there. Random game from last year that feels like it would fit well is Chants of Sennaar. Played though it with my non-gaming partner and we had a blast.
Sennaar didn't gel with me, because language-based deduction imply an "arbitrariness" ("wobbliness"?) and mis-interpretations. To me, this felt frustrating compared to the sharpness of an Obra Dinn deduction. But for others it might be part of the appeal, and at any rate it's undeniably a polished game, so I understand that a lot people enjoy it :)
Regarding other similar recommendations I see in-thread and that are not already in the list:
- The Outer Wilds: one of my fav games ever (it's at the top of my "absolute best" list), but too 3d-mechanically-demanding for a very-non-gamer.
- The Witness: same, thus for this "non-gamers" list I preferred recommending its excellent 2D little-brother, Taiji :)
- Case of the Golden Idol: yeah it's a clear "play that too if you liked Obra Dinn", added as Obra Dinn addendum
- Lorelei and the Laser eyes: haven't played it yet, will soon!
Lorelei and the Laser eyes was one of my favorite games that I played this past year. I think it might be good for a non-gamer, but they had better absolutely love puzzles. Also some of the puzzles require playing videogames within the main game and I can't remember exactly, but they may not make much sense or be very fun if you don't have experience with like PS1 era horror games.
For The Witness, I would recommend tagging it as appropriately not accessible. There is a section that can't be completed at all without hearing, and large chunks of the game that I can't imagine are possible with color blindness. I don't have either of these issues, but running into those things really rubbed me the wrong way. It is a game that seems to value the creators vision above all else and isn't willing to make any sacrifices for the audience.
Edit: I realize I misread and thought you were saying you were going to add The Witness to the non-gamer list, which was why I was saying that a disclaimer would be extra useful. Left it anyway.
> For The Witness, I would recommend tagging it as appropriately not accessible. There is a section that can't be completed at all without hearing, and large chunks of the game that I can't imagine are possible with color blindness. I don't have either of these issues, but running into those things really rubbed me the wrong way. It is a game that seems to value the creators vision above all else and isn't willing to make any sacrifices for the audience.
For sure, "uncompromising" or "design-opinionated" are adjectives that fit Jonathan Blow (lead designer & programmer of The Witness) and I doubt he'd object :D.
He was asked about these inaccessible puzzles, and from what I remember, his answer was pretty much what you intuited: that he was aware, but unwilling to compromise, in a "not every art if for everyone and that's fine" kind of way. And announcing them or having { I am color-blind, I am deaf } accessibility options to adapt could/would have spoiled the surprise, so he went ahead with them.
Is it too insensitive / dickish? Maybe, I wouldn't know as I know little of how a vision or hearing-impaired person would feel in front of that. Hey, I'm going to ask a blind friend how he perceives such an attitude: is it "Yeah it sucks", or is it "Whatever, the game isn't actively making fun of disabled people, there's just two sections needing access to certain senses where I'll ask for help, I'm used to it and that's okay"? Curious to see his take.
I still like The Witness for what it is. Maybe I will change my mind someday and will flag my recommendation with an inaccessibility warning, but for now it's in my "absolute best" sub-list without caveat.
> Lorelei and the Laser eyes was one of my favorite games that I played this past year. I think it might be good for a non-gamer, but they had better absolutely love puzzles.
Cool, will try it soon! It's already purchased, I'm just waiting for patches to ship (I'm a "patient gamer": I have my dose of coping with bugs from $JOB, so when it comes to games I choose to never play games day/week/month 1, to let them stabilize). If good, might add it to my "best puzzle games" sublist, https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games?list=puzzle
I used to follow the development blogs of the witness. I remember reading somewhere that accessibility was why you can beat the game with only 7/10 sections complete. You can completely skip both the colour puzzles and sound puzzles and still finish the game. Its an interesting compromise.
As someone who is colorblind, you are correct. Those puzzles are just about impossible for me.
> Sennaar didn't gel with me, because language-based deduction imply an "arbitrariness" ("wobbliness"?) and mis-interpretations
After not too far in, you eventually start confirming the meanings of words. Eventually you confirm the meaning of every word of every language. So, while learning a language can be a challenge of interpretation, eventually you do get concrete meanings.
Edit: I'd also recommend The Sexy Brutale for your list, it's a time loop detective game.
> Sennaar didn't gel with me, because language-based deduction imply an "arbitrariness" ("wobbliness"?) and mis-interpretations.
I definitely found the misinterpretations entertaining. It seems like they went to some amount of effort to anticipate potential misinterpretations, such that discovering those misinterpretations later would lead to amusement.
Thanks for the recs, some I've never heard, but Outer Wilds is in my all time Top 3 games ever made. Have you played the DLC? Just as amazing, but of course go in blind :)
My favourite thing about the DLC (which I have yet to finish) is how well it integrates into the main game. It's "just there", and you can go play it if you look specifically for it, or leave it.
> Outer Wilds is in my all time Top 3 games ever made
Hey, same, it's at spot #3 of my "absolute best" list, https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games#outerwilds . The list I was sharing my "for non-gamers" list, and I stand by the fact that Outer Wilds has non-negligible chances to be a bad experience for very-non-gamers. I know it because I've seen it:
1. The very-non-gamer has zero chance of being able to navigate a 3d space before many hours of manipulating a twin-stick gamepad or kb+mouse ...
2. ... And some of them even get nausea from the 6-axis degrees of freedom spacecraft navigation needed by games like Outer Wilds or Descent!
Thx :) . I found out about Slipways via Jonathan Blow (maker of The Witness), who was obsessed about it for a while and played it a lot on stream. I like that kind of smaller games you can summarize with "<genre>, distilled", as they often let me enjoy a <genre> I normally don't like.
Happened with Slipways (4X, distilled), but also with Into The Breach (Turn-by-turn combat, distilled), Islanders (Civilization, distilled), or Thronefall (Real-Time Strategy, distilled).
Extremely addictive and chunky if you like deduction puzzles, and scaled perfectly so it doesn't become overwhelming. Only problem is it's over so quickly.
Oh interesting, I heard about The Case of the Golden Idol a few years ago but it wasn't out on a system I owned- I see that it's available on Mobile free with Netflix. I'll check it out immediately!
Also the recent Immortality by the same author. The cast and story (stories?) are just incredible. It's not a perfect game, but it is the most incredible fusion of gaming and cinema ever created.
Thank you for the wonderful list. Here are some other suggestions that I haven't seen mentioned yet. Apologies for not describing or linking to the games:
- Reventure (highly recommended)
- Recursed (same)
- Treasure Adventure Game, or its remake Treasure Adventure World
- Loot Hound (so relaxing)
- Wilmot's Warehouse (same)
- Out of Space (the opposite of relaxing)
- Q.U.B.E.
- There Is No Game
- An Untitled Story
- Tools Up!
- Viscera Cleanup Detail
And of course the well-known (as far as I can tell) Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Undertale, Stanley Parable, Dicey Dungeons, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, Firewatch, Transistor, Overcooked.
Note that a few you recommended are already in the list or in other sub-lists, you might have missed them if you only reviewed the "for non-gamers" sub-list that I linked to. For the full smorgasbord, check out https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games?list=all
Hola! I thought that Baba is Lovely at first, but then come the later levels and alas, Baba is Too Much.
(With the usual qualifier: for me ! I don't doubt many puzzle freaks absolutely loved it and 100%ed it, but for me it was too much, too hard, too tedious).
There's loads of puzzle games that are great for this! Off the top of my head, check out Lorelei and the Laser eyes, the recent Monkey Island, Case of the Golden Monkey, the two Talos Principle games, maybe The Witness?
I am not sure how well a non gamer would take it. I recall some tricky platforming or timing sections which would be too much.
As a matter of fact, I recall I had to cheat to lookup the solution to a puzzle or two, only to discover I had the right idea, but was executing it too poorly to work.
I'd add Chants of Sennaar to this list. It's similar to Case of the Golden Idol/Obra Dinn in that the entire game is about making deductions about the game world, but in this case it's about decoding fantasy languages.
Such games are a treasure. My wife and I enjoyed Firewatch and Take of two brothers, as well as all the amanita design games like that. One person has the controls but two people are actively engaged :-). Any tips for others?
I half agree. While I respect Pope's artistic vision and the work that went into the aesthetic, I personally found it headache-inducing to actually look at. Especially with how much of the game is about gleaning clues from the environment, I simply could not enjoy it and dropped the game pretty quickly.
Having worked on graphics programming for more than a decade, I still didn't pick on that when I played the game. Considering the overall visual language of the game, I'd say it's 100 hours well spent.
Could have easily published this at SIGGRAPH under temporal coherence for non-photorealistic rendering.
I definitely noticed the dithering stability as I was panning around the scenes but would have never guessed that so much had gone into making it so; I’ll appreciate it a lot more now, having ingested this writeup.
For people who are unaware "Return of the Obra Dinn" and "Papers, Please" are both games by Lucas Pope and they are both considered absolute classics and have won multiple awards. Well worth checking out even if you don't consider yourself a typical game-enjoyer. They are not typical games.
"Papers, Please" is a masterpiece. Obra Dinn I must have made some mistake, because it stopped giving me clues after way too few stories to match anything else.
Once it starts raining you have access to all the bodies you need on the ship. Rewatch every flashback and take notes. Details really matter, and those flashbacks are crime scenes that need to be studied fully. Pay special attention to clips in quick succession, as a clue from another flashback may show the means of death or the killer.
>Details really matter, and those flashbacks are crime scenes that need to be studied fully.
This is really what the game is all about. It's amazing when you're going through a scene for the 10th time and pick up on a huge clue that's been hiding in plain sight all that time.
Ahh, thank you! I'm not sure it started raining, I'll check.
I’m quite fond of watching Let’s Plays of Obra Dinn (it’s the closest I can get to experiencing it for the first time again), and there is a fundamental mistake I see happening over and over: people not getting the rules the game plays by.
First off, the game is tough but fair. I’ve seen a lot of people say out loud what the correct solution is, but not punch it in because the game could be tricking them. In fact, the game would rather give you a hard puzzle and help you solve it rather than giving you an easy puzzle and trick you away from the solution.
Second, the game does a a neat trick of using very contrived game-y mechanics (the magic of the pocket watch) to present information, but only to enable that information following fairly natural real world logic, rather than puzzle game logic. People are unexceptional — they hang out with their peers, use more or less familiar language depending on who they’re talking to, stick to their jobs unless shit is hitting the fan (and even then, their job informs how they react).
Another thing I like about Obra Dinn is that some puzzles admit more than one solution when two interpretations make equal sense.
What do you mean by “stopped giving clues”? The clues are all around you. Hair styles, clothing styles, accents, places, etc.
I can't tell you how much I _loved_ that accents from the voice actors were a part of it. It was the first time I truly felt like a _detective_ in a video game, stuck piecing together whatever I could from a painstaking analysis of the details in front of me.
That being said, I got stuck and brute forced my way to one or two solves, only to find out at the very end (talking to a friend who completed it) that I had missed a crucial and very helpful detail. Made it obvious that's why I was stuck trying to brute force, which was deeply unpleasant by design: the triple-match made that very tricky and only once I got the search set down a lot.
Yes, it’s worth knowing going in that if you have to guess then you’ve missed a clue. Or several.
I had to make a few educated guesses of identities towards the end of the game - I think among the last 5 or so people. Now I am wondering which clues I missed.
If it was "who are all these topmen" then you are supposed to notice the differences in the shoes sticking out of numbered hammocks and use that to put together with the few times they are involved in a memory while awake.
It was indeed the topmen. Damn, yeah, completely missed those then haha.
There were some I found really hard, and required a lot of backtracking, ie watching "other" scenes but picking up who was there in the background and such.
I might have had a couple of lets say educated guesses, but the rest was hard work piecing together details.
Easily one of my favorite games ever, and I've been playing for almost 40 year now.
I definitely brute-forced my way through significant portions of Obra Dinn, but the fact that you can do that at all (and it's not TOO onerous) is nice.
Papers, Please is an all time favorite of mine. I made flash cards to remember key bits of information and drilled on them to improve my review skills. Not many games would have me doing that. Never played Obra Dinn because the art style didn’t appeal to me. That said, if you like mystery games, check out Curse of the Golden Idol. It’s adjacent to these games from a creative standpoint and a lot of fun.
The art style grows on you even if you don't like monochrome graphics, and it's definitely more impressive in motion rather than in screenshots.
I say give it a chance, you're missing a cool game.
Remember that Curse of the Golden Idol is getting a sequel next week
I've only played Obra Dinn, but I similarly had a notebook filled with notes that I used through the game.
His website has many really cool projects he did for game jams. Really fun/creative ideas. Several became full games.
He also did an interview on the playdate podcast, which was super fun. One of those little tidbits that reminds you why it can be so easy to fall in love with programming.
I’ll have to check that out!
I've been playing FPS games since "Wolfenstein 3D", and "Return of the Obra Dinn" is the only one that has ever given me motion sickness.
Still finished it.
I like the art style a lot and was so excited to play it.
After a two hour session on my TV, I had to stop due to motion sickness, and I haven’t picked it back up since. Was really fun though.
Harsh 1-bit dithering is such an interesting topic - even in 2d there are multiple ways of doing it, each with trade-offs and advantages.
It is amazing to me that something that was so integral to the 80s computing experience is now actually quite tricky on modern hardware. For my own project[0] I found that it is almost impossible to ensure a one-to-one mapping between offscreen pixels and the canvas provided by the browser.
[0] https://sheep.horse/2023/1/improved_web_component_for_pixel-...
I still find it funny that my pretty new nVidia card takes several seconds to switch between resolutions while my 35 year old Atari could switch resolution several times per screen refresh. I made a simple game that had color display in low resolution on three quarters of the screen while the bottom had 4 colors and double horizontal resolution to fit more text instead. So resolution change was done 120 times per second without slowing down the cpu much at all.
Well the nvidia would have no trouble doing that at the refresh rate, resolution and colour depth that the atari was using if that was the target. Ataris were great for their time no doubt but to optimise very high frame rate, colour depth and resolution a modern graphics api is doing some setup that requires a bit of time so that the common case works very smoothly after that.
Yes, that is the problem with modern things. Claming to be new and modern but things that used to be instant is getting slower and slower. There was a time when things were still getting faster and faster. I had the privilege to try a normal fixt-line phone a month ago. I had totally forgotten how fast they call and connect after using a modern smartphone for years.
I remember the time when I started with phones. A connection took 10-20 seconds before you heard the tone after dialing the number. And then the AXE (or whatever they vere called) switchboards came. The connection time dropped to just a second or less. Now the connection time depends a lot on how fast your smartphone is. Mine takes several seconds even though it's just a couple of years old.
Yes, we've all become so emotionally invested in the idea of the inevitability of technological progress that we've blinded ourselves to the fact that much of what we experience is a technological regression buried under layers of gleaming chrome. Just because something takes a lot more effort to achieve doesn't inherently mean that it represents progress.
There is nothing about the modern graphics pipeline that absolutely requires mode changes to take seconds. That's literally an eternity in computer time.
At least the refresh interval can now be changed on a frame by frame basis again. Resolution and bith depth changes on the other hand are still take an insane amount of time.
It looks like none of the proposed approaches work well, and the problem seems to be much more complicated that it looks.
I think what might work properly is:
- A "fractal" dither pattern so that it can be zoomed out and in smoothly and is scale invariant
- Doing things in texel space so that both camera movement and object movement works properly
- Doing bilinear filtering (perhaps keeping all samples instead of storing the weighted average) or perhaps supersampled rendering of the dithered pattern, and then using some sort of error diffusion pass in screen space (with a compute shader)
But not actually sure if this works in practice.
If that's not enough, an alternative would be to do things in screen space "naively", then reverse map the screen space rendering to texel space (in a resolution-preserving way), and use the information in texel space on the next frame to create a screen space solution compatible to the one in texel space, map it to texel space, etc., effectively building up the fractal per-texel pattern incrementally at runtime. This might be the best solution but seems very expensive in terms of memory, computation and complexity.
I've got a fractal approach working pretty well as of last week:
https://x.com/dgant/status/1851840125065453894 https://x.com/dgant/status/1851835968342446576?t=kCUSWCtJEc_...
How it works:
- World space dithering
- Apply 2D ditheringalong triplanar-mapped surfaces
- Choose coordinate scale based on depth such that the dither pattern ranges on [1px, 2px)
- Paint sufficiently distant surfaces using spherical coordinates
So there's some repainting at depth thresholds but it's not very loud in practice.
Doesn't seem fractal: the dots on the door become big as the camera approaches it rather than revealing underlying fine-grained structure.
Valid critique. I think nothing prevents the technique from being applied at multiple levels of detail to make it do what you describe.
That is wild! It's not every day I get to see a completely new, unique visual effect. Kudos.
I'd love to see a video with vastly slower movement, so I can pay attention to what's actually happening. The fast movement turns it all into a blur (literally).
Went a bit further down the rabbit hole and found the previous devlogs he posted about the topic for anyone interested. [1] [2] Of note was an upsampling algorithm called Scale2X he talked about. [3] Pretty neat !
[1] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.260 [2] https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=40832.msg121719... [3] https://www.scale2x.it
I just love the fact that this guy shares everything on those forums.
I remember seeing early parts of his work on papers please and there is something wonderful about sharing your process and exposing it to feedback.
I feel like you have to have an audience of sorts while you work, else it's like screaming into the void.
But that'd be sort of a chicken and egg problem, right? You can't build an audience unless you're willing to scream into the void :)
It's also probably the best way to build a following for an indie game that'll otherwise just be a drop in an ocean of games released everyday
Tigsource is a treasure trove of information and design docs. Lots of famous games were hatched there (spelunky and dead cells to name a few).
Minecraft's origin WIP thread, too!
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0
> The main inspiration for this game is Infiniminer
https://www.zachtronics.com/infiniminer/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__Nq2vNcpIo
Discussion at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15766249
One of the best write-ups on dithering that I've seen so far! I worked on the b&w dithering for Return to Dark Castle.
We wanted to use Atkinson dithering, but it was hard to do in a shader because of how neighboring pixel values trickle into each other, and I was super stressed and tired at the time. I don't think it occurred to us to pin the pattern to the offset of the scene, so I think there is twinkling on scrolling levels like the catacombs and helicopter pack. But maybe we did? I wish I could remember. Anyway, kudos!
I recently downloaded it from GOG and tried to play it on a 5K studio display. I wasn't able to get a result that did not blur those beautiful pixels, which is such a shame. Yes, I did go into all those setting menus.
You have to find a way to set your display letterboxed to a resolution that is a direct multiple of whatever the game plays at.
The game should really be handling that internally.
Just for fun, here's the OST from this game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qvdAWLcPyU
See also https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@runevision/11050883717334359...
Posting the link here probably was too much for a video serving mastodon instance
Wow, this seems to be a clear improvement over the Obra Dinn method!
Not at all. There are visible discontinuities that show the underlying geometry. It's also a very different kind of effect to begin with - more resembling print patterns rather than the more pixel-based dithering from older computer graphics.
I don't know what discontinuities you mean. The point about the "print pattern" seems confused. He just made the dots bigger to see them better in a compressed video. I still think this is clearly better, as it is perfectly temporally stable, unlike the Obra Dinn method.
I genuinely prefer the original and think the final approach gives too much of "low res texture" look as opposed to a pure 1 bit dithered output.
For a five-second demo I agree. But for five hours of playtime, I think the original would result in serious visual fatigue.
Yeah, I've played hours of Minecraft with my own dithering renderer, but I'm sure going to 1-bit would give me a headache within minutes.
I wonder if rendering the in-game graphics as if they are being shown on a virtual monitor would provide some respite. If the virtual monitor was on a desk with other items, then would give players some place to rest their eyes.
> maybe I shouldn't let these bullshit little pixels push me around
Found a new mantra for my life.
I always found the error diffusion dithering techniques to be very interesting. It's amazing the result you can get with such minimal information.
This doesn't use error diffusion but instead a dither pattern (ordered Bayer and blue noise). Not sure why, as error diffusion has better image quality. Compute cost could be a reason.
I think first and foremost, using dither patterns is just a lot more authentic to the old black and white visual style Obra Dinn is emulating. Go on YouTube and watch some clips of Shufflepuck Café or The Manhole and you'll see that it's all hand drawn art specifically designed to be viewed in 1-bit, and it's all based on dither patterns, not error diffusion.
Error diffusion may yield better results for converting photos to lower bit depths, but it also makes very noisy looking images where edges are muddied and shades bleed into each other. Bitmap art of that era used patterns because it gave the artist a lot more control over the look.
The goal here is not to minimize PSNR or anything like that, but to give a clear and aesthetically pleasing image. And the goal of Obra Dinn is to do that while also matching a historical style. And if you look at individual screen caps of the game, you can see just how successful that effort was.
Secondly, error diffusion is nonlocal, which makes it hard to implement efficiently on a GPU. With a dither pattern, you can calculate each pixel individually, which is ideal for a shader. With error diffusion, you might be able to do some kind of wacky exclusive scan approach with multiple passes to squeeze some parallelism out, but its almost certainly going to perform worse than a dither pattern.
Finally, locking error diffusion to the camera like he did with the dither patterns sounds even harder than the already difficult work he did to get to a decent level of temporal coherence. I honestly have no idea how you'd do it, because the idea is just antithetical to the entire concept. If you don't solve that problem, I think the result would not only fail to capture the intended aesthetic, but would also be pretty nauseating to look at.
That makes sense, just one remark:
> I think first and foremost, using dither patterns is just a lot more authentic to the old black and white visual style Obra Dinn is emulating. Go on YouTube and watch some clips of Shufflepuck Café or The Manhole and you'll see that it's all hand drawn art specifically designed to be viewed in 1-bit, and it's all based on dither patterns, not error diffusion.
That's true for ordered dither patterns like Bayer, which Obra Dinn uses for some objects. But the rest uses a blue noise pattern, which stylistically has a "look" similar to error diffusion, but in terms of preserved detail it behaves only as well a Bayer pattern, so not as well as error diffusion.
Error diffusion probably breaks the design requirement for "stability" frame-by-frame.
Is this a new style or is he trying to emulate something retro? (If it is the latter case, what was the convention at the time?)
I think it’s trying to emulate something retro, but make it work for a modern game?
Like 1-bit games were normal back in the day, but those games were mostly still images or something. And it’s an entirely different set of problems to try and make a fully 3D game with only 1 bit color.
This is tech for a modern game (Return of the Obra Dinn) imitating the retro look of old hi-res monochrome games, e.g. for the Mac.
If you haven't played Obra Dinn, you owe it to yourself to play it. The look is retro (sort of, it's actually very smooth) but the gameplay is definitely "modern indie".
This is one game I think would be amazing in VR.
You're right, I think they would be fun.
Part of the appeal was definitely the retro look, but this is a very-specific retro look that the author worked hard to put into 3D space.
If people tried to make a "retro" to VR games, you'd mostly just get lots of blocky, cheap-looking graphics. But this could really be weird, in a good way.
The modding community did look at it but the first problem was that it's a Unity game built for D3D9 game, which doesn't allow the VR plugin to be dropped in. They did request the developers create a D3D10/11 build to allow that but I'm not sure it ever happened.
Even if it did, VR relies on getting consistent images for each eye for the stereo view, which might be difficult with this style of rendering. It'd be hard to know if it works without trying it!
I don't know, I start feeling off when just watching a video of the game (a little queasy, a bit of a headache). I think that playing it in VR would be a horrible experience.
This forum post made me dizzy.
Oh this is genuinely fascinating.
I literally had no idea so much went into the dithering, my presumption was there was just an off the shelf posterization filter applied.
The end result looks fantastic and managed to give me wild nostalgia for playing games like The Manhole on my friends Macintosh Classic as a kid.
One of my favorite games ever, my wife and I played through it together. I feel like there's not a lot of games you can play with another person these days and playing it like that was a wonderful experience. I would highly recommend playing it with another person if you have the chance.
> I feel like there's not a lot of games you can play with another person these days and playing it like that was a wonderful experience. I would highly recommend playing it with another person if you have the chance.
Absolutely. Shameless self-plug to my list of games for "non-gamers" that I find enjoyable with a friend or significant other: https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games?list=nongamer . The first of the list is ...... Return of the Obra Dinn ^^.
A lot of great stuff on there. Random game from last year that feels like it would fit well is Chants of Sennaar. Played though it with my non-gaming partner and we had a blast.
Thanks!
Sennaar didn't gel with me, because language-based deduction imply an "arbitrariness" ("wobbliness"?) and mis-interpretations. To me, this felt frustrating compared to the sharpness of an Obra Dinn deduction. But for others it might be part of the appeal, and at any rate it's undeniably a polished game, so I understand that a lot people enjoy it :)
Regarding other similar recommendations I see in-thread and that are not already in the list:
- The Outer Wilds: one of my fav games ever (it's at the top of my "absolute best" list), but too 3d-mechanically-demanding for a very-non-gamer.
- The Witness: same, thus for this "non-gamers" list I preferred recommending its excellent 2D little-brother, Taiji :)
- Case of the Golden Idol: yeah it's a clear "play that too if you liked Obra Dinn", added as Obra Dinn addendum
- Lorelei and the Laser eyes: haven't played it yet, will soon!
Lorelei and the Laser eyes was one of my favorite games that I played this past year. I think it might be good for a non-gamer, but they had better absolutely love puzzles. Also some of the puzzles require playing videogames within the main game and I can't remember exactly, but they may not make much sense or be very fun if you don't have experience with like PS1 era horror games.
For The Witness, I would recommend tagging it as appropriately not accessible. There is a section that can't be completed at all without hearing, and large chunks of the game that I can't imagine are possible with color blindness. I don't have either of these issues, but running into those things really rubbed me the wrong way. It is a game that seems to value the creators vision above all else and isn't willing to make any sacrifices for the audience.
Edit: I realize I misread and thought you were saying you were going to add The Witness to the non-gamer list, which was why I was saying that a disclaimer would be extra useful. Left it anyway.
> For The Witness, I would recommend tagging it as appropriately not accessible. There is a section that can't be completed at all without hearing, and large chunks of the game that I can't imagine are possible with color blindness. I don't have either of these issues, but running into those things really rubbed me the wrong way. It is a game that seems to value the creators vision above all else and isn't willing to make any sacrifices for the audience.
For sure, "uncompromising" or "design-opinionated" are adjectives that fit Jonathan Blow (lead designer & programmer of The Witness) and I doubt he'd object :D.
He was asked about these inaccessible puzzles, and from what I remember, his answer was pretty much what you intuited: that he was aware, but unwilling to compromise, in a "not every art if for everyone and that's fine" kind of way. And announcing them or having { I am color-blind, I am deaf } accessibility options to adapt could/would have spoiled the surprise, so he went ahead with them.
Is it too insensitive / dickish? Maybe, I wouldn't know as I know little of how a vision or hearing-impaired person would feel in front of that. Hey, I'm going to ask a blind friend how he perceives such an attitude: is it "Yeah it sucks", or is it "Whatever, the game isn't actively making fun of disabled people, there's just two sections needing access to certain senses where I'll ask for help, I'm used to it and that's okay"? Curious to see his take.
I still like The Witness for what it is. Maybe I will change my mind someday and will flag my recommendation with an inaccessibility warning, but for now it's in my "absolute best" sub-list without caveat.
> Lorelei and the Laser eyes was one of my favorite games that I played this past year. I think it might be good for a non-gamer, but they had better absolutely love puzzles.
Cool, will try it soon! It's already purchased, I'm just waiting for patches to ship (I'm a "patient gamer": I have my dose of coping with bugs from $JOB, so when it comes to games I choose to never play games day/week/month 1, to let them stabilize). If good, might add it to my "best puzzle games" sublist, https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games?list=puzzle
I used to follow the development blogs of the witness. I remember reading somewhere that accessibility was why you can beat the game with only 7/10 sections complete. You can completely skip both the colour puzzles and sound puzzles and still finish the game. Its an interesting compromise.
As someone who is colorblind, you are correct. Those puzzles are just about impossible for me.
> Sennaar didn't gel with me, because language-based deduction imply an "arbitrariness" ("wobbliness"?) and mis-interpretations
After not too far in, you eventually start confirming the meanings of words. Eventually you confirm the meaning of every word of every language. So, while learning a language can be a challenge of interpretation, eventually you do get concrete meanings.
Edit: I'd also recommend The Sexy Brutale for your list, it's a time loop detective game.
> Sennaar didn't gel with me, because language-based deduction imply an "arbitrariness" ("wobbliness"?) and mis-interpretations.
I definitely found the misinterpretations entertaining. It seems like they went to some amount of effort to anticipate potential misinterpretations, such that discovering those misinterpretations later would lead to amusement.
Thanks for the recs, some I've never heard, but Outer Wilds is in my all time Top 3 games ever made. Have you played the DLC? Just as amazing, but of course go in blind :)
My favourite thing about the DLC (which I have yet to finish) is how well it integrates into the main game. It's "just there", and you can go play it if you look specifically for it, or leave it.
Outer Wilds DLC is also amazing yeah :)))) . They managed to keep surprising the player with hidden-in-plain-sight stuff. Also, the soundtrack is a-ma-zing, https://andrewprahlow.bandcamp.com/album/outer-wilds-echoes-...
> Outer Wilds is in my all time Top 3 games ever made
Hey, same, it's at spot #3 of my "absolute best" list, https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games#outerwilds . The list I was sharing my "for non-gamers" list, and I stand by the fact that Outer Wilds has non-negligible chances to be a bad experience for very-non-gamers. I know it because I've seen it:
1. The very-non-gamer has zero chance of being able to navigate a 3d space before many hours of manipulating a twin-stick gamepad or kb+mouse ...
2. ... And some of them even get nausea from the 6-axis degrees of freedom spacecraft navigation needed by games like Outer Wilds or Descent!
That's a great list! I like that you even played small indie games like Slipways, which I found tons of fun! Bookmarked, our tastes are very similar
Thx :) . I found out about Slipways via Jonathan Blow (maker of The Witness), who was obsessed about it for a while and played it a lot on stream. I like that kind of smaller games you can summarize with "<genre>, distilled", as they often let me enjoy a <genre> I normally don't like.
Happened with Slipways (4X, distilled), but also with Into The Breach (Turn-by-turn combat, distilled), Islanders (Civilization, distilled), or Thronefall (Real-Time Strategy, distilled).
Oh, I see a few on there I'd like to try out, thanks!
Big fan of The Case of the Golden Idol, mentioned in that list.
According to Steam stats, it's been a huge success for them, which surprised me and has given me hope for the state of the gaming scene.
The two DLCs have been excellent. They're also working on a sequel set in the 1970s, The Rise of the Golden Idol, due for release in a few days [1].
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2716400/The_Rise_of_the_G...
Extremely addictive and chunky if you like deduction puzzles, and scaled perfectly so it doesn't become overwhelming. Only problem is it's over so quickly.
Oh interesting, I heard about The Case of the Golden Idol a few years ago but it wasn't out on a system I owned- I see that it's available on Mobile free with Netflix. I'll check it out immediately!
One of my favourite games ever. Have fun!
I loved the gameplay on "Her Story". I don't know if I finished the game, it really didn't matter anyway.
Also the recent Immortality by the same author. The cast and story (stories?) are just incredible. It's not a perfect game, but it is the most incredible fusion of gaming and cinema ever created.
Thank you for the wonderful list. Here are some other suggestions that I haven't seen mentioned yet. Apologies for not describing or linking to the games:
- Reventure (highly recommended) - Recursed (same) - Treasure Adventure Game, or its remake Treasure Adventure World - Loot Hound (so relaxing) - Wilmot's Warehouse (same) - Out of Space (the opposite of relaxing) - Q.U.B.E. - There Is No Game - An Untitled Story - Tools Up! - Viscera Cleanup Detail
And of course the well-known (as far as I can tell) Terraria, Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Undertale, Stanley Parable, Dicey Dungeons, Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, Firewatch, Transistor, Overcooked.
This post became longer than I expected.
Thx! I'll try a couple :)
Note that a few you recommended are already in the list or in other sub-lists, you might have missed them if you only reviewed the "for non-gamers" sub-list that I linked to. For the full smorgasbord, check out https://ronan.jouchet.fr/games?list=all
Thanks. I forgot to mention De Blob (and its 2).
I think Outer Wilds might have a place in a list like this.
What a great list, thanks for sharing.
Thank you very much for the list.
Given that you have Patrick's Parabox in that list, have you played Baba is You?
Hola! I thought that Baba is Lovely at first, but then come the later levels and alas, Baba is Too Much.
(With the usual qualifier: for me ! I don't doubt many puzzle freaks absolutely loved it and 100%ed it, but for me it was too much, too hard, too tedious).
> I feel like there's not a lot of games you can play with another person these days and playing it like that was a wonderful experience.
May I suggest Her Story / Telling Lies / Immortality ?
There's loads of puzzle games that are great for this! Off the top of my head, check out Lorelei and the Laser eyes, the recent Monkey Island, Case of the Golden Monkey, the two Talos Principle games, maybe The Witness?
The Outer Wilds (not The Outer Worlds) is also a fantastic game along those lines.
Don't read too much about it, you want to go in as blind as possible.
I am not sure how well a non gamer would take it. I recall some tricky platforming or timing sections which would be too much.
As a matter of fact, I recall I had to cheat to lookup the solution to a puzzle or two, only to discover I had the right idea, but was executing it too poorly to work.
FWIW they did go back and refine some of the puzzles after launch, so depending on when you played it might be smoother now.
I'd add Chants of Sennaar to this list. It's similar to Case of the Golden Idol/Obra Dinn in that the entire game is about making deductions about the game world, but in this case it's about decoding fantasy languages.
Case of the Golden Monkey sounds fascinating, but almost too secretive. It's an Idol, not a Monkey :-)
Excellent list! I'd also add The Crimson Diamond to it.
Hah. Well, at least I didn't write Curse...
Such games are a treasure. My wife and I enjoyed Firewatch and Take of two brothers, as well as all the amanita design games like that. One person has the controls but two people are actively engaged :-). Any tips for others?
I had the same experience playing it with my wife. The shared puzzle solving lead to some very late nights. My favorite game of the last 10 years.
The game is mostly black and white. The dithering effect isn't actually pleasing and sometime confusing.
I half agree. While I respect Pope's artistic vision and the work that went into the aesthetic, I personally found it headache-inducing to actually look at. Especially with how much of the game is about gleaning clues from the environment, I simply could not enjoy it and dropped the game pretty quickly.