Sol Ni Koro - Now on Kickstarter
 

Back To Basic Gaming started a Kickstarter and a Steam Greenlight campaign for their RPG Sol Ni Koro:

More information.

The engine and examples look OK, but I'm just so sick of "giant pixel" retro-look. We wouldn't have made games with giant pixels back in the day given the choice (not much you can do at 320x256!), but this indie insistance on "faking the past" is just bad.

The engine itself looks like it'll be fine for basic RPG purposes, so no complaints on the tech, but please devs, design your art for 1080p clarity and use the extra clarity to add more narrative/emotional detail to sprites. By all means give your game an old school feel with basic tech and (some) recycling of assets, but don't fake it with substandard art "because that's what they did back then". I assure you, we didn't do it on purpose!

The essence of hipsterism - faking style forcefully .

Usually people who are clueless and cant come up with their own ideas, people who never had their own attitude and their own style

Yes, the pixel art fad for me lasted one game.

The one game that it really worked for me on was Evoland, which evolved from giant pixels through to about Final Fantasy 7 level graphics. That made sense in terms of gameplay and what the designer intended (showing the evolution of video games), and despite its low-fi beginnings, that game evolves into a modern recreation of a Playstation-era basic-poly 3D RPG (at a modern res). This works really well, and I thoroughly enjoyed Evoland, but the key was in making the low-fi portions a meaningful part of the game.

Another excellent "retro" style of game is Itle Dew, which is effectively Indie-Zelda. However, despite feeling similar to NES/SNES Zelda games, the art was clear and sharp and utilized modern pixel-counts to provide the feel and "simplicity" of an older game, without the baggage.