How Animal Well taps into PS5 hardware to elevate 2D pixel-art platforming

blog.playstation.com:

Animal Well is just another 2D pixel art indie game, so why does it look and feel…just a little bit different? In his recap of Summer Games Fest, Danny O’Dwyer (Noclip) put it best when he called Animal Well “the game that’s hardest to explain why I liked it.” Defining what exactly sets it apart can be elusive, especially when your brain tells you that it looks like it could have come from the Commodore 64 era. Today I thought I would take some time to break down some of the work that goes into making a single frame of Animal Well look the way it does. What lies ahead will be a relatively brief and high-level tour—each of the features shown could have a blog post of its own—but nevertheless I think a peek under the hood will prove interesting.

To start, Animal Well is rendered in many different layers that all get composited together in fairly complicated ways. Here you can get a glimpse at some of those layers, and how they are used together to render lighting, before producing the final image.

This shot is from early in the game where you can use firecrackers to banish a pursuing ghost. We can break it down to see some of the rendering steps involved.

For additional fun, we can also look at what that shot would look like with lighting disabled.

When it comes to rendering, Animal Well is doing a lot of small things that add up to the final result you see. Here are just a couple examples.

When a light moves across the background scenery, it illuminates it differently based on what direction the light is coming from. To achieve this, I’m using normal maps. Normal maps are textures that help define little geometric details on a surface that would otherwise be perfectly flat. The color of each pixel represents the ‘surface