The use of colorful backdrops populated by abstract shapes and patterns reflects the playful nature of the franchise, and they cleanly evoke the feel of each location without getting bogged down in the details of actually rendering it accurately. Perhaps objects needed bright colors and clear silhouettes so they didn't all blur together, but that's just good visual design in general.įittingly, Kirby 64 is still one of the best-looking games out there. Sure, character animations needed to be exaggerated just to be understandable at low resolution, but that also made them more expressive. I don't think I'm injecting too much intentionality through hindsight here. Consequently, N64 devs decided to cast aside unnecessary details in favor of tightening their aesthetics. With Monster Jaunt, I targeted an N64-era aesthetic in hopes of reducing my workload for these technical tasks, but I overlooked a critical characteristic of early 3D games: expectations and hardware were different in the '90s, and animation and rendering minutiae would go unnoticed by most players in this era of 240p resolution on CRT TVs. Even after animating an entire game, the most basic tasks still prove esoteric and frustrating. There's a whole host of little details to nail - inverse kinematics, animation lerping, idle fidgets, facial expressions, and so on - and nothing shatters verisimilitude like the player character's cool dress clipping through her giant sword.īut folks, that's all very hard. Looking at modern video games, there is a mind-boggling amount of time spent making 3D characters feel cohesive with the worlds they inhabit to avoid breaking immersion. I will never again make a game with characters who have knees. This entry was contributed by Nate Buck, founder of Sketch House Games, which just released the skill-based party game Monster Jaunt. Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work.

Kirby 64 games