June 9, 2026
Pixel drama goes full cat mode
Making Graphics Like it's 1993
This solo dev is making a shooter like it’s 1993, and the comments are loving the madness
TLDR: A solo developer is building a full game that intentionally looks and works like an early 1990s shooter, right down to the tiny color palette and hand-made everything. The comments split between retro nitpicking, huge respect for the effort, and jokes that this is exactly the kind of art-by-obsession that AI can’t fake.
A game developer just walked into the internet and basically said: yes, I am deliberately making my life harder for fun. Their side project, Catlantean 3D, is a first-person action game built to look and feel like a very early 1990s PC game, with chunky visuals, only 256 colors, hand-made art, hand-mixed sound, and a self-imposed ban on what one commenter gleefully framed as “AI slop.” The vibe is less “efficient modern game studio” and more “mad scientist with a pixel obsession,” and the community is absolutely eating it up.
The biggest reaction? Respect mixed with nerdy nitpicking. One commenter jumped in to lovingly correct the comparisons, saying this is closer to Wolfenstein 3D than Doom because of the way the walls and rooms work. That’s the kind of deliciously specific argument the retro-gaming crowd lives for. Others were more emotional than analytical: one person said they “can’t wait to be able to play it,” while another, apparently a fellow traveler in the Church of Foolishly Unreasonable Constraints, praised the detailed breakdown like it was catnip for engine nerds.
And then came the jokes. One fan confessed an “irrational” love for the weird dark, poster-like look created by the old-school color limits, which is honestly the most relatable retro-art take imaginable. Another dropped the spicy line that this kind of work is something large language models are “ridiculously bad at,” turning the whole project into a tiny anti-AI victory lap. In short: the game isn’t even out yet, and the comments already sound like a fan club, a debate club, and a support group for people who miss crunchy pixels.
Key Points
- •Catlantean 3D is a spare-time first-person shooter project planned for release on Steam next year.
- •The project is built under strict retro constraints, including hand-made assets, hand-written rendering and audio mixing, 320x240 resolution, and a 256-color limit.
- •The author uses fixed-point arithmetic for deterministic game logic and floating point for rendering.
- •The article focuses on asset creation and explains palette-based rendering through classic VGA graphics, especially Mode 13h and Mode-X.
- •The game’s palette was iteratively designed with reserved colors and thematic color ranges to support gameplay needs and the Catlantis setting.