So, I had a neat idea of something I could do with a game I was working on: take the 2D plane the game was running on and stack it on a 3D plane, so that the game would visibly take place on a screen in a different, 3D world.

I whipped up a quick demo:

2025 Editor’s Note:

In retrospect, this neat idea was actually the worst kind of idea: a total project killer.

It sucked up a bunch of time and air, and obviously I lack the experience and chops to build a viable full 3D game: so chasing this idea would be impractical.

Something about the mere existence of this 2D/3D divide ended up drawing a lot of focus and thought, but it was so obviously impractical that the project couldn’t continue. Rather than rolling it back and continuing with an earlier build, I simply moved on to the next idea.

This was the last time I ever posted about this project.

(editor’s note: For a while I was working on this project in Godot, a little RPG thing.)

This is turning out to be super interesting pixel art experiment:

The level’s geometry is very basic and I’m encoding the texture information on a normal layer rather than by painting it.

When combined with light sources, the level’s texture information looks very naturalistic.

basic geo:

2D normals:

final: