See How This RPG's PS1-Style Pre-Rendered Backgrounds Look In-Engine
The developer of Static Between Stations also explained how they were made.
Static Between Stations is a "Disco Elysium-meets-Persona" narrative-driven RPG set in the dying city of Patchwater, where you explore, negotiate, scavenge, craft, or do whatever you can to stay out of trouble. Your stats and dice rolls shape what happens next, and every decision has consequences.
Apparently, the game's backgrounds and cutscenes are entirely pre-rendered in Blender, giving it that classic PS1 vibe you might remember from games like Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX, and Resident Evil. Basically, if you use a photo as the background and line up the camera and any foreground objects correctly, it creates the illusion that you're actually walking around inside the background image. According to the developer, this approach is very performant:
"I essentially get path-traced lighting for all my environments, but for the 'cost' of only having to play a single video in the background. Obviously there are lots of trade-offs, but it suits my use case very well!
Tbh the main benefit to this approach for me though is the benefits to my workflow. It lets me use very high-poly 3D scans of objects and abandoned buildings I've found irl and not have to worry about optimizing them since the actual mesh/texture never actually ends up in Unity.
It also makes it so I don't have to worry about any one scene being a performance bottleneck since they're all basically just a background video and some foreground objects."
Here's a quick breakdown of their process:
Watch the trailer below and wishlist Static Between Stations here. The game is currently planned to launch later this year.
You can also check out the official YouTube channel and TikTok, where the developer is most active.
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