Why does it look like that?
I'm doing Nuclear Lizard Island Rampage mostly in a PSX style with a SEGA twist. If you have five minutes, you should absolutely go check out the community. Some truly beautiful art comes out of it
Anyway, I picked it for a few reasons; scope, tone, and personal nostalgia.
I am a one-person studio. So, scope is the dictator of every decision. The PSX style comes with built-in restrictions of fidelity trying to emulate as closely as possible what the original PlayStation was capable of. This limits how much time I can spend on any given object. If the max texture size is 256x256, you can only do so much, but it also forces you to really think hard about what you can do within those limits.
Artists also love using the PSX style because of the tone of the era, and some of the expectations it sets for them. If I went with anything close to realistic graphics, players might expect realistic physics, gameplay, enemy movement, they might even expect the little people to have legs. It is way too much. I could have gone with a simpler art style like the cozy toon style that's popular right now, but I don't want the player to approach the game with a cozy mindset. I want you to run at the beach like you’re fucking Sweet Tooth. I want you to approach this game with the unbridled chaos of an angsty teenager, and the PSX style invokes a time when everyone assumed the only people playing games were angsty teenagers.
I've also limited myself to the minuscule color palette available to the SEGA Genesis. People who work with PSX often use it for horror and mil-sims because Resident Evil and Metal Gear take up the most mental room in the zeitgeist. We forget that Crash, Spyro, and A Bugs Life were on the same console. I'm working entirely in the SEGA palette because I wanted to emulate the bright blue skies of Sonic. Crazy Taxi wouldn't have felt as free with the color palette of GTA3, Halo wouldn't feel as good if the Covenant dressed as drab as the Locusts, and NLIR would feel a lot more depressing if you were crushing workers to death on a bleak, gray day instead of a bright, sunny beach.
The nostalgia part, that's mostly for me.
If you want to see more of the game, check out the Steam page for Nuclear Lizard Island Rampage, or read more about its production here, and pick up the game on Oct. 1st so you can smash some chaos in the sun.
