A Tale of Three Remakes

A very very mean and evil person named @Scribby decided to unleash a horrible plague upon my free time.

(He got me helplessly addicted to Halo.)

Game remakes can be very hit or miss. Recently I have been trying to dissect what makes a remake good and what makes it bad on multiple different levels. This matters a lot to me because I'm making a remake, which why you're on this page reading this devlog right now instead of enjoying Christmas with your family and friends.

Today I will be pouring out my thoughts on the best way to handle updating graphics in a remake by examining Portal With RTX and Halo 2 Anniversary.

Why these two games?

• Both of the originals are from around the same era.

• Both are official remakes developed by different studios than the originals.

That being said...

Halo 2 Anniversary blew me away. The updated assets capture what the originals could not due to limitations. The new assets aren't necessarily 1:1 with the original, but deviate only in ways that help better portray what each asset is supposed to be. For example, where random blobs of geometry with a rubble texture were in the original, modeled piles of identifiable debris stand in their place in the remake. The new sounds and music are also a treat and follow the same philosophy; they deviate from the original to be a better version of what that sound was trying to be.

Portal With RTX underwhelms me. The entire game wasn't made out of love for the original, but instead to leverage sales of RTX graphics cards. It does not stick to Portal 1's art style and just adds complexity to an already perfectly coherent art style for the sake of upping the resolution. Many of the changes amount to just sticking light sources and reflective surfaces wherever they could to justify purchasing a new GPU. It also included no new music, SFX, test chambers, or challenges; just some optional skins for cubes buried at the bottom of a config menu that you need to type in codes to unlock.

I want Service Pack to be Halo 2A, not Portal RTX. For me this means being within the spirit of what Mary's Arcade was trying to be without as many technical limitations, instead of just being an RTX reskin. Is anyone actually reading this? Comment "Deer Mouse" if you read this.

Alright, now that you've skipped the boring stuff, let's look at the first major application of this philosophy to an actual game asset. I made sure to pick the most exciting thing of all time: Walls. In truth, the entire reason I had that existential design crisis was over the wall material in the first place.

You see, in the original Mary's Arcade, walls just look like this for the most part:

Basic white paint with brick on the bottom. What's wrong with that? Well, it looks bad in the new graphics.

Here's what I mean:

Brightened of course, and with a small amount of displacement mapping. Sure, it looks like Mary's Arcade, But Mary's Arcade was meant to look like Chuck E Cheese's. Just looking like Mary's Arcade, funnily enough, is not in the spirit of Mary's Arcade. That iteration, and all others that followed it, were Portal RTX: no new substance or vision, just a new, more demanding coat of paint.

I could go into detail here about every sequential change I made to the wall to arrive where I'm at now, but that's:

• Super long and boring

• Already on the Mary's Arcade Discord if you really care.

All you really need to know is that I wanted to keep the brick, but brick on the bottom just wasn't looking right. Normal maps weren't looking right. Displacement textures weren't looking right. Hard modeling was out of the question.

Now, with some help from @manedpizzawolf I have a wall design I can work with, and two variants of it that both look good to me, and are more within the spirit of what MA1 was trying to be, rather than being an exact remake of the texture.

I present: The most underwhelming thing you will see all day:

*not actual part of any room, just temporary geometry.

These might not look like MA1's walls, but they are closer to how the walls in a place like the Mary's Arcade restaurant should look. To me, this is Halo 2A, capturing what the original was trying to be, but just wasn't. Yes it's a radical departure from MA1, but it works much better with Mary's Arcade 2 and SP's unified art style (yes 2 is still being developed, and SP is just 2's art style taken photo-real.)

I hope you like the look of the new walls (which are still being tweaked), and more importantly, I hope you spend time with friends and family on this Christmas day.

Mary Christmas, from me to you.

Art by @TDMan