90s-2000s game devs were engineers - very smart innovators whom can create new things.
The whole Super Mario Bros games is just 32kb - smaller than most jpgs unloaded to this site.
Modern game devs are just using pre-established tools. They can't make anything new.
This is why gaming has stagnated, why 2025 games don't look that much better than 2007 Crysis.
>>716495680 (OP)
Wasn't there a post where some devs were seeing if they could recreate the aesthetic in an actual game? Like, the only way this series of melted together 2d images could become a game was if a game dev actually did it?
>>716496506
The limiting factors would be a strong enough voxelization pipeline and perspective tricks to simulate parallax. https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace has some techniques for the voxelpixel look, and some additional LOD logic could be used to simulate parallax / add in perspective tricks.
Doing it entirely in shader would rely on a properly dialed in geometry + fragment shader and fancy perspective matrices to simulate parallax. Years ago I have a "voxelizer" for a VXGI implementation I winged that I think I could repurpose into making voxelized-sprites like that.
