Dev Diary #18 - Pixel-Painted Art Style

[p]\[RECORDING: ORPHEUS-LOG.4123-7: TRANSCRIBED][/p][p]"…we're down to emergency power. Life support is holding, barely. Hallway lights are dead, just those strip lights along the floor now, pulsing like a heartbeat. I don’t know if that’s comforting or just cruel."[/p][p]"I saw something in Hab Deck 2... hiding, crouched under the bulkhead, hunched over one of the maintenance crew. Its body was... wrong. Not just in shape but also in the way it caught the light. Like it wasn’t reflecting correctly. Like the shadows didn’t agree on where it was."[/p][p]"I couldn’t make out a face. Just movement... jerky, non-human. Every time I blinked, it was somewhere new."[/p][p]"If you're hearing this… don't come looking. It's too late for us, for me. Destroy it before it..."[/p][p]\[TRANSMISSION END][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]This week, Pixel Reign's Project Lead is taking over the dev diary to share some insights into what makes Moros Protocol’s visual style stand out. From retro pixel inspirations to custom rendering tricks, here’s how they brought our world to life...[/p][p][/p][h3]Inspiration[/h3][p]A lot of people look at Moros Protocol and say, “Oh, it’s like DOOM!” But actually our visual foundation goes back further to the 16-bit pixel art era.[/p][p]I spent years working with pixel art in game development, and I’ve always been fascinated by how a few well-placed pixels can suggest complex shapes, lighting, and motion. It’s all about illusion and technique, especially the shading methods artists used to imply depth and texture.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Old Tricks, New Tech[/h3][p]Once I knew the look we wanted, the challenge became how to achieve it in a modern engine without losing that hand-crafted feel.[/p][p]To do that, I rewrote Unity’s deferred renderer, modified the GBuffer, and created custom shaders that simulate the old pixel art shading techniques using real-time lighting.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]1: Unlit texture.  2: Traditional lighting.  3: Final result.[/p][p][/p][h3]Low-Poly, High-Intent[/h3][p]We wanted a visual style that felt grounded and stylized, but not “blocky” like voxel-based games. So we targeted an early 2000s polygon count for our 3D models: low-poly enough to feel stylized, but detailed enough to support modern lighting and animation.[/p][p]Textures are kept at a constant pixel density across the board. In fact, our pipeline uses more texture layers than most conventional 3D shaders.[/p][p][/p][h3]The "Pixelizer" Shader[/h3][p]One of our key tools is a custom shader we call the Pixelizer. It uses a special texture built with diffusion techniques taken from classic pixel painting.[/p][p]This texture allows our lighting to behave the way pixel artists used to simulate with color ramps and dithering, giving smooth shading without losing the stylized look.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]Thanks for reading. We’ll be back next week with another behind-the-scenes look at Moros Protocol.[/p][p][/p][p]See you in the stars 💫
- Pixel Reign 🚀[/p][p][/p][h2]Be sure to wishlist👇[/h2][h2][dynamiclink][/dynamiclink][/h2]