Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
saffroncr.itch.io
Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#2What an excellent example of designing for the medium instead of trying to make the medium do something it's not good at! Your whole approach shows a real love, like a delicate respectfulness, that I think characterises early games and is less apparent as the systems get better (though I am sure it is still there).
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#3Does the upscaling from 200x120 happen pre or post dithering?
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#4For anyone who enjoys this sort of thing, I found this postmortem of an Alone in the Dark clone for PICO-8 highly informative:
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#5Amazing. I never get over the 2 bit colour illusion of scale.
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#6Highly relevant:
Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#7Given the 168MHz ARM, the real innovation here is the way stable dithering and a cell shading look was used to make the graphics good looking. Very well done!
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#8Highly relevant: Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering https://runevision.com/tech/dither3d/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs
Way, way too slow for Playdate though. I tried implementing it, including lots of simplifications, and it is still not really practical: https://aras-p.info/blog/2025/02/09/Surface-Stable-Fractal-D...
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#9I love this post because it goes well beyond "can I render 3d graphics on this device" and into "how can i play with the combo of art and rendering tech to get a nice looking scene on this device.
Very cool, thanks for sharing!
Re: Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld
#10What an excellent example of designing for the medium instead of trying to make the medium do something it's not good at! Your whole approach shows a real love, like a delicate respectfulness, that I think characterises early games and is less apparent as the systems get better (though I am sure it is still there).
Agreed - I expected someone trying to render a simple object or scene and was pleasantly surprised.