Project Shadowglass

Posted2 months agoActive2 months ago

layer8

125 points

46 comments

shadowglassgame.comTechstory

calmmixed

Debate

40/100

Game DevelopmentRetro GamingGraphics Rendering

Key topics

Game Development

Retro Gaming

Graphics Rendering

Project Shadowglass is a retro-style 3D game that has sparked interest and debate among HN users, with some praising its nostalgic aesthetic and others questioning its development status and gameplay.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Active discussion

First comment

52m

Peak period

0-3h

Avg / period

5.8

Comment distribution46 data points

Loading chart...

Based on 46 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
Oct 28, 2025 at 9:06 PM EDT
2 months ago
Step 01
02First comment
Oct 28, 2025 at 9:58 PM EDT
52m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
14 comments in 0-3h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
Oct 30, 2025 at 11:18 AM EDT
2 months ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (46 comments)

Showing 46 comments

rappatic

2 months ago

5 replies

This looks really cool and I will doubtless play, if it ever comes out. Unfortunately I get Hytale vibes from this website. I don't understand the point of announcing such a project, not least with such an elaborate landing page, so early in development.

deckar01

2 months ago

1 reply

I’m still waiting for Eitr.

jamilton

2 months ago

I’m sure miegakure is going to come out any day now.

zdc1

2 months ago

Given the call to action is to wishlist the game or subscribe to their mailing list, I guess they could use the interest to validate their idea or even to try and get funding.

Kiro

2 months ago

The standard marketing advice in game development is to announce your game and launch your Steam page as early as possible to start collecting wishlists. In fact, considering how much footage and gameplay they are showing off I would say they are announcing it too late. So I don't agree that it's too early in the development compared to other indie titles.

Aeolun

2 months ago

It's to give yourself some form of accountability if you have a strong habit of never completing projects. When you've made a website for it, suddenly it feels like something that you need to work on.

vunderba

2 months ago

Agreed. I tend not to announce or even share plans for impending projects until I have something nominally concrete.

Interestingly there was a paper from a few years back where they found that a participant's commitment was found to diminish in the long term if they prematurely shared their goals.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-06873-015

uvaursi

2 months ago

2 replies

I appreciate the work but as someone who grew up playing these games and quake and blood and all those novalogic titles, it was never about the graphics. They were just fun.

In a sense the pastiche nostalgia reminds me of the 80s retro boom. It is way over the top to the degree that nothing back then looked or sounded like that. It was more low key and subdued.

tclancy

2 months ago

As a child of the 80s, I see it as an homage to King’s Quest and games like that (with a touch of Defender of the Crown), but I suppose the beauty of an alpha release ad is it’s simply a Rorschach blot for us to project whatever we want to see on it.

allenu

2 months ago

I wouldn't go so far as to say it was "never" about the graphics. There was definitely a sense of wonder when I first saw Wolfenstein 3D, then Doom, and later Quake. It was the graphics that got you first and made you think, "Oh wow, I can wander around this world?!" Thankfully, they were fun games as well.

I think what's getting people interested in this project is the sense of wonder they get from the visuals. Who knows if they can deliver, but there's something about how this looks that gives me a sense of wonder.

fallat

2 months ago

1 reply

"Early alpha trailer"

For that reason, I'm out.

khazhoux

2 months ago

What separates being out from being in? None of us can play the game yet.

quacked

2 months ago

6 replies

I believe the concept for this project is an AI-generated pixel art GIF that went very viral on X a few months ago:

https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1947024682118488116

I am not sure this project is capturing the strangely compelling sense of scale shown in that GIF, but it's nice to see someone taking a shot at it.

zdrummond

2 months ago

1 reply

It does not appear to be AI, and is a passion project by a single developer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY

Tiberium

2 months ago

The concept (the X link) is AI-generated with Midjourney, the game isn't.

xixixao

2 months ago

1 reply

What makes you believe that? The video the author put out doesn’t mention that.

Cool gif nevertheless.

gyomu

2 months ago

https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1949291379655373061

Fraterkes

2 months ago

Ironically, I think a large part of the sense of scale comes from it being a vertical video. Really helps with stacking all these layers of environment on top of each other. Anyway, Rückenfigur (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCckenfigur) style concept art where there's a tiny figure in front of a huge layered environment has been common in games for decades, the difference is that with ai we can create """concepts""" that look nearly like a playable demo.

This game looks cool, but also the trailer just showing 3 static scenes from the same angle for a minute is a sure sign that this is very very early.

karlgkk

2 months ago

I don’t think it’s ai because it correctly resolves both vertical and horizontal parallax with correct perspective lines applied to the scene - something ai still seems to struggle at greatly

ArtRichards

2 months ago

In a youtube demo, the author says he has been working on this idea for a while, and was motivated to deliver after the GIF. So, kinda? Thanks for the reference.

https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY?si=iKXJSNIuLiU5nOnj

Tiberium

2 months ago

Two other replies to this comment seem to have missed the fact that the inspiration for the game is AI-generated, the game itself is not made with AI.

lynndotpy

2 months ago

1 reply

Makes me think of the voxel displacement renderer ( https://blog.danielschroeder.me/blog/voxel-displacement-mode... ) from a year ago.

I had an idea a little back about using hand-drawn mipmaps (.5x, 1x, 2x, etc) scales for sprites, with some method for nearest neighbor, (e.g. with a 3x scale taking pixels from the 2x and the 4x scale). I imagined I wasn't the first to have that idea, but it was just a passing thought. I wonder if OP is doing anything like that?

Anyways, very neat.

MattRix

2 months ago

1 reply

That mipmaps thing is an interesting idea!

lynndotpy

2 months ago

I'm sure I wasn't the first to think of it, and I think that's roughly what we're seeing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9FMp5QgOvY&t=108s

If you go frame by frame, the texture becomes more detailed, about 8x as many pixels. It looks like a normal LOD switch as the camera gets close to the wall. It might be a texture without enough in-between scales.

2muchcoffeeman

2 months ago

1 reply

What’s the difference between this and voxels?

keyle

2 months ago

The difference is, this is "normal" geometry, with fixed 64x64 textures (or similar) mapped with hard edges (nearest-neighbour filtering, no bilinear/trilinear/blur).

Voxels is quite different: the world is made of cubes of 1 size or various size cubes (any texturing method can apply here, or without, some even use gradient shaders on the cubes).

So you get that pixel art vibe, mapped into the 3D world with smooth movements. The 3D window isn't made of stairs.

In this case, this is done "properly". Because some developers just use normal geometry, normal texturing with bilinear filtering, and slap a post processing shader on the camera view, which makes the view "blocky" without the world actually being blocky - which is cheap, and typically looks cheap.

the-kenny

2 months ago

1 reply

Why would I want to play a game where the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, trying to get a bit less poor myself? I already do that in the real world.

Klaster_1

2 months ago

Any game you'd recommend where that's not true?

davedx

2 months ago

2 replies

"3D pixel art" = a 3D engine running in a lower resolution? It looks like 320x200

mfro

2 months ago

1 reply

Yeah, I don't think this is anything revolutionary. I was thinking they were actually doing something a-la DOOM's pseudo 3D, but no, this is definitely just downscaled 3D.

layer8Author

2 months ago

1 reply

Downscaled 3D doesn’t create such a stable pixel structure across movements.

mfro

2 months ago

1 reply

Depends on the technique used. Temporal methods don’t look this way but standard downscaling can.

layer8Author

2 months ago

1 reply

I don’t really see how. What do you mean by “temporal methods”?

mfro

2 months ago

1 reply

By temporal I refer to DLSS, FSR, TSR, etc. In this game's case, I imagine it's not as simple as downscaling, there is probably some shader work involved similar to this:

https://youtu.be/Cwh_TpouPfQ

layer8Author

2 months ago

1 reply

DLSS, FSR, TSR are for upscaling, not downscaling, so I’m not sure how they would apply anyway.

The creator hints a bit at things in this video: https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY?t=2m55s

mfro

2 months ago

Temporal sampling techniques do (in supported titles) have the option to supersample and generate higher resolution images, but they are most commonly used to efficiently downsample for FPS gains with minimal quality degradation.

From the Wikipedia page for DLSS:

The goal of these technologies is to allow the majority of the graphics pipeline to run at a lower resolution for increased performance, and then infer a higher resolution image from this that approximates the same level of detail as if the image had been rendered at this higher resolution. This allows for higher graphical settings and/or frame rates for a given output resolution, depending on user preference.

Pet_Ant

2 months ago

Yeah, it definitely seems like it is 3D. If it wasn't you'd expect a lot more pop-in and jumps when you cross a scaling threshold. It's a cool effect, but it's like a voxel pass on a 3D world AFAICT.

Havoc

2 months ago

Love the name. They should keep it

jdlyga

2 months ago

This is everything we imagined point and click games to be as kids.

Rooster61

2 months ago

This is super trippy. I saw the screenshots first and though "Huh, they really nailed that early point-and-click RPG vibe. Neat, but only mildly interesting". Then I clicked on the video and realized it's 3D. "Oh..."

The castle in the distance really gives me some sort of surreal feeling of fleshing out areas that didn't exist in the old games. Back then, the highly degraded road in the distance you understood to just sort of be skipped if you clicked on the castle, whereas with this, that little brown, poorly rendered strip is an actual place you will traverse and have come alive. Neat.

fishbacon

2 months ago

Looks amazing.

A recent game, Eclipsium[0], was a short horror game with a similar esthetic. I really liked it for the simple gameplay and the short (less than 4 hours) completion time.

I wonder if it can carry a larger scale.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2419670/Eclipsium/

asadm

2 months ago

this seems to be inspired by the extremely viral ai-generated video:

https://x.com/de5imulate/status/1947024682118488116

rckt

2 months ago

> Wishlist and follow dev updates

How about no? Damn, this has been going on for a while now. I have around 5 titles in my wishlist that are dead by now.

layer8Author

2 months ago

The creator talks a bit more about it in this video: https://youtu.be/v9FMp5QgOvY

LarsDu88

2 months ago

I like the pixelated look, but that's probably nostalgia. Presumably this effect was achieved using a shader rather than an old school software renderer like old-school Quake and Half-Life (the last games I remember where you could switch between OpenGL and "software renderer")

jsmailes

2 months ago

Fun art style and I'm sure there's some interesting tech behind the renderer/shader - to my eye it looks like the pixels don't shift much as the camera pans, which would naturally happen a fair bit if you're simply doing nearest-neighbour sampling. I'd like to see some gameplay though; so far it's just a tech demo, albeit a very pretty one.

View full discussion on Hacker News

ID: 45741391Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 2:40:40 PM

Want the full context?

Jump to the original sources

Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.

Open link View on HN