Like a lot of people, I really enjoy the crunchy, pixelated look of many retro games. There’s something iconic about the look of games made with limited color palettes and severe hardware/resource constraints that makes them very aesthetically pleasing — so, like many others, I spent some time trying to recreate that look with modern tools. Specifically, I wanted to create an arcade-style flight simulator a la Star Fox with a more modern take on the retro-style… style.

Screenshot from Star Fox for the Nintendo 64.

Star Fox (1993) — still an iconic look, if perhaps a bit outdated.

For this project, I was inspired by the game A Short Hike, which has both an adorable art style and fun, simple gameplay that I thought would be a great challenge to replicate (the art style that is – although I suppose you could call A Short Hike a flight simulator, in a sense!). The game’s creator, Adam Robinson-Yu, gave a talk at GDC in 2020 where he discussed several aspects of the game’s creation, including the art style and rendering tricks used to accomplish it.

Screenshot from 'A Short Hike'.

A Short Hike (2019)

The game’s iconic pixelated look is achieved by rendering the output of the main game camera to a downscaled render texture, and then blowing that up without any antialiasing to then fit the target resolution. For my project, I did this in the same way by rendering to a Unity Render Texture, then displayed that on the UI inside a RawImage object. By tweaking the render texture resolution, I was able to achieve a slightly more pixelated look that I felt better suited my overall goal. I then modeled some simple assets and began building the shaders using Unity’s built-in URP Shader Graph to create the ocean shader and other shaders in the scene.

Screenshot from the Skychaser proof of concept build.

Screenshot from the proof-of-concept build — still a work in progress!

If you’d like to try it for yourself, you can here! Use W/A/S/D to control the ship, and Q/E to roll. It also works with a gamepad controller.