Hacker Remix

Building a Game with the Real Engine

135 points by luu 4 days ago | 33 comments

Groxx 1 day ago

Point and clicks have quite a few similar examples, the genre lends itself well to dioramas because even when it's 3D it's often a fixed camera path that you can optimize for.

As an example, a nice looking one from a decade ago: https://store.steampowered.com/app/205020/Lumino_City/

Papetura also got a fair bit of attention for a while (for good reason, just look at it): https://youtu.be/ZVhtuKleLuI

Personally I love the hand-crafted "real" look these bring. It tends to consume a ton of disk space, but it looks good pretty much forever.

aeontech 1 day ago

Lumino City was the first one that came to mind for me as well!

The next one was the Fantasian, by the creators of Final Fantasy (https://youtu.be/ePFgyBtvqQU) - apparently this is finally coming to non-Apple platforms this year, at that.

rkachowski 20 hours ago

Same, I was blown away watching the making of video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLv2uHxygc0) and discovering that these environments were created physically. The whole world had that soft handcrafted feel, and it turned out to stem from actual crafts!

butlike 13 hours ago

That Dungimon system in Fantasian seems like it may be the best new idea for JRPGs I've seen in like...forever.

esperent 24 hours ago

Same, it's such an amazing game. And the mobile port is great too.

krypton2k 1 day ago

There was a nice game in this style called The Neverhood.

jermaustin1 17 hours ago

This is the game that comes to my mind. I had the demo from a Windows 95 game disk. The demo was great. Never played the full version though.

22c 1 day ago

The soundtrack for The Neverhood was also very nice.

a3w 18 hours ago

Lowdee huh

croo 22 hours ago

That game was made out of 3.5 tonns of clay.

PinkMilkshake 1 day ago

Something similar was done for the 1996 game Creatures. A part of the diorama still survives and is on display at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge (https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/42694/Creatures-Deve...).

ehnto 1 hour ago

I still have a few of these games! It doesn't capture me quite like it did back then but the art style is still beautiful, and I remember it kicking off my understanding of "AI" as in game AI, not LLMs.

Understanding how wants and needs drove actions, and marvelling at the language learning game mechanic. The genetics gameplay as well. It was well ahead of its time. I was early teens when I first played it, the same year I started learning to make games in Dark Basic.

esperent 24 hours ago

Wow that's a blast from the past! 12 year old me was absolutely addicted to this game.

jtxt 15 hours ago

Reminds of an early tank simulator where the driver in the cockpit saw a video feed from a camera on a gantry they were slowly driving around a diarama. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AcQifPHcMLE

"Real engine" for just one player at a time though.