Looking back at the Obra Dinn [spoiler free]

In Lucas Pope’s newest game, “Return of the Obra Dinn“, you play an insurance adjuster who travels to an abandoned ship to learn what happened to it’s crew. It’s an insurance themed murder-mystery game at sea.

Christine and I just finished the game and loved the experience. The story is fantastic, but what really hooked us was the highly stylized graphics. Lucas wanted to recreate an old school look similar to what you’d find in older Sierra Online games. To recreate this look, Lucas takes a 3D environment, adds wireframe lines (to give 3D objects a 2D look), converts it to grayscale, then uses a dynamic noise effect to break the shading into a dithering effect.

I remember a year back when he was sharing some of his early experiments and some of the challenges that dithering created when used in a 3D environment:

Reducing 1-bit dot flicker via sphere-mapped dither pattern:https://t.co/rcxdgLBrLU pic.twitter.com/LoDoEuxneU

— Lucas Pope (@dukope) November 23, 2017

Front-back is hard to watch on loop so here's side-to-side instead. The dither pattern is less critical during camera translation because everything else in view is also changing. pic.twitter.com/28mva8uXeC

— Lucas Pope (@dukope) November 23, 2017

You asked for it. pic.twitter.com/hB9RrORUTu

— Lucas Pope (@dukope) November 23, 2017

It can be aligned up/down/left/right for some views but that produces slightly more aliasing artifacts. pic.twitter.com/mu3ZHIotZl

— Lucas Pope (@dukope) November 23, 2017

A more detailed explanation of Lucas’s dithering technique can be found on this tigsource thread.

The Return of the Obra Dinn can be bought on Steam here.