My favorite PS1 game is probably Resident Evil 2, and I have spent countless hours playing it ever since I was in middle school. Every year, when the weather gets cold, I usually play through it as a tradition. I love everything about this game - the look of it, especially. I absolutely love the old-style survival horror games with pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed camera angles - one of the most hated styles of game design, I know, but for me, it’s the best. With those pre-rendered backgrounds, every scene is like a cinema shot. It heightens the tension and suspense SOOOOO much to not be able to look around at will in all directions, to instead be constrained in what viewpoint you can see. It also allows for better lighting, shading and color effects to be accomplished - since each background is like a painting.
My question is: since I love this style of game so much, and it’s so obvious that it’s never coming back (especially in today’s gaming world, where multiplayer and FPS rules), would it be possible for an independent game programmer to make a similar survival horror game, in a visually identical style, with the same kind of fixed camera angles and pre rendered backdrops? How hard is it to make a game like this? It seems like it’s pretty easy for at-home tinkerers to make 3D games, using the “engines” of other games. But I’ve never even heard of someone attempting to make a fixed-camera third-person game.
Are backgrounds like this extremely difficult to create? This screenshot illustrates the basic concept of fixed camera angles and backdrops - it looks like creating the character paths (essentially a one-dimensional line) would be the easy part. Is the backdrops the hard part?
Say an effort was made to get hundreds of die hard Resident Evil fans to donate small amounts of money to pay some out-of-work programmer to create this game. Would that be possible?