A quick breakdown/tutorial of how I do sprite stacking for my game. #gamedev #pixelart #indiedev #godotengine

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Yup, however still cool that you use sprite stacks. I think it has unexploited potential.

How to make 2d look 3d Step 1: make a 3d model Step-- wait I already have a 3d model, why the fuck would I go back to 2d Step 3: make a 3d game

That looks really cool, but how much more different is the end result than just using an integer scaled pixel filter on a normal 3D image? Or voxels?

Tbh 3D with a filter would look similar, but I just wanted to experiment. It's fun to fake 3D the way old-school devs had to. The main difference is whole object sorting instead of a depth buffer, more control over the lighting, and just getting that authentic retro jank

I am also making a game with pixel art ships rendered from 3D models. I simply baked 32 headings. Maintain a 45 degree camera angle always, so I can get by with just 32. I also pre-baked shadows and the height of each pixel (for sinking animations).

Woow! Nice work, great minds think alike! Your game seems almost ready and mine is just a little experiment for now, because I barely have any free time right now between work and prepping for my engineering degree exam. Wishing you huge success with the project!

did you just invent voxels?

Kinda, but it has that authentic retro vibe. For example, object sorting works on whole sprites at once instead of per-pixel depth, which gives it that classic 2.5D look and many more little quirks

well it looks cool!

This is how Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun etc did their units I believe

There's a great amount of hand-waving going on in "4. A bit of perspective math"

I made a tool you might like let me know if you try it out! Scores bounded PNG sprites against explainable pixel-craft checks. Builds OKLCH hue-shifted material ramps. Quantizes PNGs against original built-ins or bounded user-owned palette JSON without overwriting existing files. Reports same-hue contrast and palette structure. Measures animation motion and visibility using rendered-pixel math. Exports and directly checks trusted local .ase/.aseprite documents through a separately installed Aseprite CLI. Exposes the same bounded operations to local MCP clients over stdio. Replays user-owned, SHA-256-pinned golden corpora without promoting results to approval.

That's fantastic! This kind of reminds me of the marching cubes algorithm. You are basically creating voxels by converting slices of the 3D model into pixel layers.

this looks extremely overcomplicated.

Maybee, spritestacking is well known retro technic and tbh i thought at the end outcome would look more unique and retro…

Why not use 3D in the first place?

Tbh i thought it would look at the end more retro than it looks right now…

soo.. just voxels

I've used sprite stacking before, but the issue with this is optimization. Maybe there's a way to do it correctly, but it takes way too much effort to do so. The effect is cool though.

Seems like there must be existing voxel editing tools that could make editing easier?

wouldnt it be easier to just use voxels to model and then collapse into pixel slices after

Nice I made this similar idea on a custom hybrid 1-bit ecs engine:

Quick question. Isn't sprite stacking just voxel? Why did you decided to use sprite stacking over voxel?

this is very sexy but i think it is a bit undistinguishable in the sea (the features are lost)

but why? why not just slap a shader onto it

Isn't this just voxel art with extra steps?

This is like black magic to me

this is like a cat scan sprite renderer 🤯

That's sick. Nice work

This is beautiful, is there a resource you can point me to for more details?

So... voxels? Interesting

its like a volumetric image... 3d i guess :D

You don't use this for the rocks and stuff, do you?

This is such a cool way of doing stuff! I’m exited to see where you go with this

Oh, Command and Conquer had similar technology, but they were technically more like pixel voxels, which allowed for animated characters, i liked that.

とても興味深い 全ての船が積層で描画されているということ？

@3kliksphilip taught me this one

how are you “extruding thickness” on a stack of sprites?

@Latiencur this is awesome, really cool stuff man!