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Are there any old, free engines where you can make games that look like these 1990s - early 2000s kinda style? I really loved the visuals ok games like Goldeneye 007 or the first Rainbow Six game.
Alternatively are there any tutorials that show how to make games in Unity, Godot, etc. look like that? I have some experience with C# and C, as well as Unity 2D.
Any help is appreciated!
This question is not about Game Design. Thread moved to For Beginners, the best forum for which-engine questions.
Use low poly models, low res textures, no shadows, no extra maps (no normals, specular, emissive, etc).
Most pre 2000 games used precomputed (baked) lighting. I don't see any reason not to light with dynamic (real time computed) lights nowadays.
Some real time lighting and shadows may be added depending on how retro you want. A fake shadow at the base of characters was the norm back then.
That time was also the time when people only had 4:3 cathod screens. You can set the aspect ration to fit that (so the game will look stretched on a 19:9/16:10 screen) and also use a shader to pixelize the game and put some kind of cathod noise to the frame.
One of my favorite games is Might and Magic® 8: Day of the Destroyer™. A really retro but fun dungeon crawler made with DirectX 7. You could try to code your game with DX7 as well. As far as I know, it still runs on Windows 7/8/10
