using a mix of textures my friend @necrolavigne made, and textures from the original Prey 1995 build, i've been putting together a new game idea...
(prey 1995 textures will not be shipped, of course; they are placeholders for art guidance only)
Loving the strong 90s FPS and early Quake mod energy this has! The strong blues remind me of Starship, an early Neil Manke map for Quake.
I don't envy the pixel artists of old who had to make everything look as close to the same as they could on 27 different graphics and hardware standards that all had less than nothing in common and probably didn't even come from the same planet.
I've often wondered if artists of the era had access to some kind of palette conversion utility that would have automated some of the process involved with this. The basic shapes and outlines are in roughly the same place in each of the palettes, but some parts clearly had to be redrawn.
So much of this era and its tools are a complete mystery to me, and I wish we had more insight into what time saving measures developers took in order to streamline tedious tasks like this.
The art tool of choice for western gamedevs from the mid-80s through to mid-90s was Deluxe Paint by EA. Yes, that EA. It was originally designed for the Amiga, which had no end of palette bullshit to manage (whisper the words "extra half-brite" into a middle-aged european pixel artist's ear and watch them start having flashbacks), so there were probably processes... not that I'm too familiar with them.
Of note is that Dan Silva, the creator of Deluxe Paint, eventually left EA and moved over to another company where he was involved in the creation of a little piece of software called 3D Studio Max. It's not often that one guy's at the ground zero of two different revolutions in digital art...
I don't envy the pixel artists of old who had to make everything look as close to the same as they could on 27 different graphics and hardware standards that all had less than nothing in common and probably didn't even come from the same planet.
I've often wondered if artists of the era had access to some kind of palette conversion utility that would have automated some of the process involved with this. The basic shapes and outlines are in roughly the same place in each of the palettes, but some parts clearly had to be redrawn.
So much of this era and its tools are a complete mystery to me, and I wish we had more insight into what time saving measures developers took in order to streamline tedious tasks like this.
A selection of images from Duality, a cancelled early 3D FPS by Double Aught (the creators of Marathon Infinity and its endlessly complicated storyline) being developed in the late ‘90s, using their own engine, for Mac OS and PC.
Duality is a completely original, true 3D action game built on Double Aught’s proprietary engine. Double Aught is a small company that split off from Bungie after completing Marathon II. Duality takes place on a distant planet, far in the future.
Duality’s world is harsh - in many ways. The planet’s axis points at the sun, so that one side is a perpetually baked desert, while the other is all darkness and ice. The narrow band at the equator is the only liveable area. The human society on Duality is equally divided - at the top are the aristocrats and the Factors, a priesthood that controls the last remnants of ancient technology left on the planet, while at the bottom are the common people and the Polys, a class defined by physical deformity and doomed to the hardest labour. Deep within the planet’s caves, and under the glaciers and deserts at the poles, wait the Builders - a sentient race laid low by a supernatural enemy many thousands of years ago. Slowly, they - and their enemy - have been reawakening.
The player is thrown into the midst of this world, with few clues to where he comes from or what he is. The player must fight well and think carefully in order to survive, and as more and more of the game world descends into civil war and chaos, the player’s fight for survival becomes a fight to save humanity - and the Builders - from destruction.
The only piece of this world to eventually get public release - outside of screenshots and the occasional soundtrack snippet - is this short story hidden deep within the depths of Marathon Infinity, set in an early version of the Duality universe.
It’s not known if any playable pieces of Duality still exist anywhere - it has been suggested (only half-jokingly) that all development materials currently reside in a lead-lined box at the bottom of the ocean, alongside the Marathon II for Windows 95 source code…
Something that is self evident in screenshots of early 3D FPS games that is often lost in modern "Boomer Shooters" is just how much the level designers clearly loved the new found freedom true 3D offered them.
Look at all the curved architecture that's in every screenshot for this game! Marvel at the pointless filigree, the caves made from subtractive/carved brushes, the verticality and sheer sense of scale that oozes from every pore and pixel that exists of this game. A lot of these screens exude strong 90s Quake mod energy, too, which makes this game's demise hit me that much harder.
This sort of "playground" approach to 3D level design extended to more genres than FPS games, but it's evident in nearly every 3D FPS from 1995 up to about 2002 or 2003 or so, and it's an aesthetic and attitude that desperately needs to be stolen and expanded upon.
