Comprehensive Retro-Style Art and Environments Guide. Tiling textures, vertex colors, etc.

There are 457 million tutorials out there on how to make PSX characters. But when it comes to early PC games, PS2 games, PS1 games, there's very little information on how to actually create environment art. People just slap on 1024x1024 textures, a dithering filter, and PS1 vertex wobble shaders and call it a day. That's not retro.

I only learned a lot of the techniques I now know because of this particular video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii_EMJHhwrQ

And to someone who is just starting out, ninety percent of this video is still going to be complete gobbeldygook.

2 Comments

alex · Feb 17, 2026 at 11:20 AM

I really enjoyed this video. I'm not a retro experienced person but I feel like such tutorials should be easy enough.

Do you have any other technique videos that you can share?

Null1 · Feb 23, 2026 at 1:05 PM

a lot of the stuff he says in the video was used more back in the 2000's, which, i guess that's retro now. But really i say this with a lot of things like, if you want to learn an artstyle for games you should find a moddable game that has that style and make stuff for it. I think half-life 2 is not a bad start for this. Especially when it comes to things like terrain. Watch some hammer tutorials and try to understand how these things work, ideally before trying to bring that experience over. I understand it's not something you'll hear from a lot of devs but it's really for the best to dedicate some time in gamedev towards actually understanding how older games worked, not just watching videos but like, actually being curious about the process and inner workings of games.

in the meantime i suppose i have a couple of sites i can send your way

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorials/dirty-textures-tip.html

http://www.poopinmymouth.com/tutorials/texture-theory-tutorial2.html

https://polycount.com/discussion/183285/texturing-in-the-early-2000s-how-did-you-do-it

https://environmentart.wordpress.com/

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Polycount
(big old treasure trove of stuff, lot of outdated links)

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