If you find this interesting, you might also be interested in this video of someone diving even deeper into how to make the dither surface stable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs
This really is a fantastic video. I don't think I'd considered many of the ideas behind dithering before seeing how it could be extrapolated to this degree.
I grew up on the small 6 inch 1 bit Mac SE display so the art style has a special place in my heart. Sadly I'm too "dumb" to fully enjoy the game as it requires a lot of attention to detail -- amazing if you enjoy detective style puzzles! I still highly respect it.
I keep feeling like there's a set of fundamental assumptions that can be optimized for, or relaxed and optimized for, in order to get at what a better method might be.
For example, stability of dithering under rotation and or some type of shear translation. What about stability under scaling?
There's been some other methods that essentially create a dither texture on the surface itself but, to me at least, this has a different quality than the "screen space" dithering that Obra Dinn employs.
Does anyone have any ideas on how to make this idea more rigorous? Or is the set of assumption fundamentally contradictory?
If anyone finds this interesting, I'd like to plug my post analyzing a similar technique, but generalized for perspective pixel art: https://tesseractc.at/shadowglass
As a retro game dev and pixel artist, this is a lot more more preferable than the constant shimmering of other recent techniques such as Texel Splatting (https://dylanebert.com/texel-splatting). Love how stable it is, reminds me of billboarding but is clearly 3D.
Interesting. I was really impressed by the art at first, taking joy in exploring that as much as the scenes themselves. But it soon faded out of focus as I was engrossed in the story and gameplay.
Yeah. I’ve wondered if the game could be a total hit on some possibly-not-yet-real eink display that can reproduce the intended effect at 60fps without such eye strain.
As a kid I imagined playing Cosmic Osmo on actual magical paper at my desk at school.
Some of the examples in the post are really bad, but even the last one has "flickering" not of the dithering pattern but of the edges, which feel "off".
Yeah, I also loved the idea, but found that playing it require me to strain my eyes too much and abandoned it. One of those games that is more fun to read about than to actually play.
Agreed. The game is tied together so well with its deductive gameplay, art, and music. I also appreciate how difficult it is, I was banging my head against it frequently during my playthrough - but the "aha" moments are so worth it.
I picked up Blue Prince after - completely different game in most respects but hits some of the same satisfying puzzle-solving/deduction notes.
What a fascinating deep dive. 2x with sphere mapping is my favourite - it starts to take on a sort of pointillism-like quality which gives all the objects (or maybe my brain) a sort of understanding of their texture.