This is a documentation of my various attempts to recreate old game styles in Unity. First up is the classic PS1 style. The first step here is to simply use a render texture to lower the displayed resolution to 320×240. Considerations have to be made as far as fonts go to find something that will be easy to read at lower resolutions. As far as the models are concerned. Taking photos, lowering their resolution (Preferably with limited or no filtering) and then projecting them onto simple geometry works great for creating models that feel old. Lowering the color depth of your game to 16bit colors also really helps. For the vertex stretch and jitter you can use a shader. This works really well. You should disable ambient occlusion and instead draw some fake ambient occlusion into your textures. Disabling shadows and adding some sort of fake shadow can also do a lot for the effect. These are just some of my findings. Here is a game I made that uses some of theses techniques. I didn’t have time to implement all of them because it was for a jam.
Lauulu lauulu is another game I made for a jam where I went with a more old school style. Although a lot more stylized and weird. I was inspired by the weird Dreamcast games I used to play.
