I grew up on the small 6 inch 1 bit Mac SE display so the art style has a special place in my heart. Sadly I'm too "dumb" to fully enjoy the game as it requires a lot of attention to detail -- amazing if you enjoy detective style puzzles! I still highly respect it.
If you find this interesting, you might also be interested in this video of someone diving even deeper into how to make the dither surface stable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPqGaIMVuLs
Interesting. I was really impressed by the art at first, taking joy in exploring that as much as the scenes themselves. But it soon faded out of focus as I was engrossed in the story and gameplay.
Some of the examples in the post are really bad, but even the last one has "flickering" not of the dithering pattern but of the edges, which feel "off".
Yeah. I’ve wondered if the game could be a total hit on some possibly-not-yet-real eink display that can reproduce the intended effect at 60fps without such eye strain.
As a kid I imagined playing Cosmic Osmo on actual magical paper at my desk at school.
Yeah, I also loved the idea, but found that playing it require me to strain my eyes too much and abandoned it. One of those games that is more fun to read about than to actually play.
What a fascinating deep dive. 2x with sphere mapping is my favourite - it starts to take on a sort of pointillism-like quality which gives all the objects (or maybe my brain) a sort of understanding of their texture.
Interesting read!
In the game it's pretty great.
As a kid I imagined playing Cosmic Osmo on actual magical paper at my desk at school.