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.
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.
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 !
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 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.
"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.
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.
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 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.
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 ^^.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
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.
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?
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.
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-...
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
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 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.
"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.
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.
What do you mean by “stopped giving clues”? The clues are all around you. Hair styles, clothing styles, accents, places, etc.
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.
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).
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
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.
Discussion at the time https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15766249
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.
Just for fun, here's the OST from this game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qvdAWLcPyU
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.
> maybe I shouldn't let these bullshit little pixels push me around
Found a new mantra for my life.
This is one game I think would be amazing in VR.
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 always found the error diffusion dithering techniques to be very interesting. It's amazing the result you can get with such minimal information.
See also https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@runevision/11050883717334359...
Posting the link here probably was too much for a video serving mastodon instance
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 ^^.
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...
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
I loved the gameplay on "Her Story". I don't know if I finished the game, it really didn't matter anyway.
I think Outer Wilds might have a place in a list like this.
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).
What a great list, thanks for sharing.
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'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.
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.
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...
> 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 ?
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.