Low Poly Dread: How to Make a PSX-Style Horror Game

Low Poly Dread is a 12-page field guide to making a short horror game with the PSX look: vertices that tremble, textures that swim, fog that eats the far end of every corridor, and a figure standing where the light runs out.

It follows one example project from first room to launch page: Night Shift, a 40-minute first-person game set on one floor of a closed hospital. Every chapter ends with the call made for it, so you can see each rule turn into a decision.

What's inside

• The machine: the six hardware limits behind the PSX look, and a modern recipe for each.
• Wobble and warp: vertex snapping and affine textures, with the shader math in five lines.
• Textures and colour: 64-pixel, 16-colour textures, the 15-bit dither, import settings for Unity, Godot and Unreal.
• Fog and light: fog that hides and reveals, vertex lighting, linear fog per engine.
• Models and spaces: triangle budgets, a grid kit and a floor plan that loops back on itself.
• Camera and control: fixed, over-the-shoulder or first person, and the numbers behind camera feel.
• Designing fear: a tension curve, the reveal ladder and a monster in three states.
• Sound and interface: low-rate audio, room tone, and save screens that cost something.
• Scope, ship, sell: an 8-week plan, the itch.io page, and where players find PSX horror.

How the pictures were made

Every 3D frame in the book comes from a small software rasterizer built for it, following the PlayStation GPU rules documented in the psx-spx hardware reference: whole-pixel vertices, affine texture mapping, polygon sorting and 15-bit colour with the console's own 4×4 dither matrix. When a caption says "PSX mode", that is what the console's rules produce.

Details

• 12-page A4 PDF in English, text selectable and searchable.
• For Unity, Godot, Unreal and GameMaker users. No shader experience needed.
• The code fragments are free to use in your own games.
• Written and illustrated with AI assistance, then fact-checked against the sources named in the book. All images are original renders, original pixel art or CC0 material: no screenshots of commercial games.

Build Night Shift faster

Small Town Buildings is our low-poly PSX kit for a small American town: assembled buildings, a modular kit, furnished interiors and props with pixel-art textures, made to the triangle budgets in chapter 5.