A classic video game deceptively created a reflection and successfully duped me entirely
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In the world of video game development, creating convincing mirror effects can be a challenge, especially when working with limited hardware or budgets. However, game developers are nothing if not resourceful, and they often use creative tricks to achieve these effects while minimizing performance impact.
In the PS Vita era, games like Uncharted: Golden Abyss and early titles of The Walking Dead had to employ such tricks due to hardware limitations. Justin Kimball, who worked on Uncharted: Golden Abyss, revealed a simple stunt used to create a convincing reflection in the game. The team created a fully rendered duplicate of a character and placed it upside-down beneath a lake's surface. This technique ensured that the duplicate character's animation was perfectly timed to match the original character's moves, creating an illusive reflection.
Derek Forte, Shesez/Boundary Break on X, recently resurfaced a clip showing how developers created eerily convincing mirror effects in The Walking Dead. In this game, a flipped version of the room and a second version of the character mimic every move in the mirror scene. Animating a mirrored clone or syncing up a full environment in reverse requires precision, especially when cutscene timing is critical.
Another popular method for achieving convincing mirror effects is through planar reflections. For flat mirrors or water surfaces, developers often render the scene from a mirrored camera viewpoint onto a texture, then map that texture onto the reflective surface. This technique requires rendering the scene twice but only for the mirrored view, which is cheaper than full ray tracing and can be optimized for limited hardware.
Environment mapping is another method developers use to simulate reflections on curved or complex surfaces. This pre-renders or dynamically updates a texture that represents the environment around a reflective object, which is then used to simulate reflections. Cube maps are a common example.
Screen-Space Reflection (SSR) is another technique that offers real-time reflections at low cost without extra scene rendering. SSR traces rays in screen space (i.e., based on the already rendered image) to approximate reflections. While more limited and prone to artifacts, it is a valuable tool for achieving convincing mirror effects efficiently.
These techniques are widely used in game engines and graphics pipelines where budgets and hardware limit the use of physically accurate methods like classical ray tracing. According to computer graphics principles, classical ray tracing produces exact mirror reflections by recursively tracing rays, but it is computationally expensive and often impractical for real-time games on limited hardware.
Modern game engines thus favor these approximation techniques to achieve convincing mirror effects efficiently. Methods such as flipping image matrices are also relevant for simpler mirror image effects in 2D or UI elements, as shown by image processing techniques in MATLAB or Java, but these do not simulate realistic 3D reflections in games.
Diving into discovering how retro games and classics were made can be fascinating. For those interested in learning more about game development and its history, the editors of Creative Bloq send out a daily newsletter with design news, reviews, how-tos, and more. Crytek, the developer of Crysis and Far Cry, is among the indie game devs that can inspire and offer retro game tricks.
In conclusion, achieving convincing mirror reflections in budget or hardware-limited games is a result of smart approximations—rendering mirrored views, environment mapping, and screen-space techniques—to balance visual fidelity and performance without the heavy cost of full ray tracing.
- Game developers often use creative tricks to create convincing mirror reflections in their games, such as rendering a scene from a mirrored camera viewpoint onto a texture and mapping it onto a reflective surface.
- Justin Kimball, who worked on Uncharted: Golden Abyss, used a simple stunt to create a reflection in the game, by creating a fully rendered duplicate of a character and placing it upside-down beneath a lake's surface.
- Derek Forte revealed how developers created eerily convincing mirror effects in The Walking Dead, by using a flipped version of the room and a second version of the character in the mirror scene.
- In the world of video game development, planar reflections and environment mapping are also popular methods used to simulate reflections on flat or curved surfaces.
- Screen-Space Reflection (SSR) is another technique that offers real-time reflections at a low cost without extra scene rendering, by tracing rays in screen space to approximate reflections.
- For those interested in learning more about game development and its history, Crytek, the developer of Crysis and Far Cry, is among the indie game devs that can inspire and offer retro game tricks.
- Modern game engines favor approximation techniques like flipping image matrices and screen-space techniques to achieve convincing mirror effects efficiently, while avoiding the heavy cost of full ray trading.
- Artists and creatives can learn about the techniques used in retro games by diving into their making process, and they can subscribe to the daily newsletter sent by the editors of Creative Bloq to stay updated with design news and tutorials.
