This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 14, April 2025

On April 11, the closed online alpha test for Preston (or Slaps)’s upcoming online multiplayer action game Drift Shell launched. The game, where players take control of a mech and fight in a low-poly world, is created by a one-person team and inspired by PS1 games like Armored Core (FromSoftware Inc., 1997).

Preston said he’s studied the work of Armored Shell’s designer, Shoji Kawamori, in an attempt to move away from drawing women with big butts in favor of 3-D mechanical shapes. In contrast to Kawamori, Preston’s angular mechs look more like alien robots than man-made machines.

In an effort to capture low-poly, PS1 era goodness, Preston went as far as creating his own engine and file format from scratch.

“My game engine, which I call SeaFoam, has shaders that replicate the vertex snapping of PS1 games that make the models look like they are wiggling when they move,” he said.

Vertex snapping refers to the PS1’s inability to process fractions, meaning that models would snap to the closest whole-number coordinate available in 3-D space, creating the wiggling effect Preston referred to.

“SeaFoam” recreates this wiggling effect by rounding all vertex coordinates to whole numbers on purpose in order to create a moodily lit, low-poly environment that screams angsty dystopia.

Drift Shell’s alpha test is closed, but you can still wishlist it on Steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3606060/Drift_Shell/