Triangle Strategy producer talks about recreating an ‘accurate’ HD-2D style

We invited several companies to make HD-2D demo footage in the early stages of Triangle Strategy’s production, and after review alongside Octopath Traveler’s other developer, Acquire, we brought Artdink on board.

While other developers created photorealistic images and reduced them, Artdink was the only developer that Acquire said had the ‘accurate’ HD-2D visuals.

They prepared a deformed image at the writing material level, before adding realistic effects to ‘build it up’. A well-made HD-2D screen has pixel art characters and background.

Contrasting that, if you reduce a photorealistic image, it looks as if you’re simply lowering the image quality, which paints a picture that says ‘maybe this would have been better left clean.’