Low Res Graphics with Voxels 🧊

Check out the source code. If you do, make sure to use the latest Godot 4 version!

Goal

In this blog post we will recreate this look in godot:

Game Scene

The base game scene we are working with, looks like this:

It can be anything you want really - I chose to build a basic boat on water. ⛵️🌊

Important to note though - set your stretch mode to viewport:

Scene Setup

Our "container scene" basically just holds both our UI and our Game:

The whole trick is setting the TextureRect texture to a new ViewportTexture and when it asks you to select a Subviewport, you pick the SubviewPort that contains your main gameplay scene from before.

Beta bugs?

Because I've found some buggy behaviour when attaching the ViewportTexture to GameTextureRect - and that's how it's supposed to be - you can set the texture at runtime as a workaround. The error only occurs when the texture is set in the editor. This way we don't set it, but let gdscript take care of it for us:

# attach this script to the GameTextureRect
extends TextureRect

@onready var game_viewport = $GameViewport

# Called when the node enters the scene tree for the first time.
func _ready():
  texture = game_viewport.get_texture() as ViewportTexture
  texture.set_viewport_path_in_scene("GameTextureRect/GameViewport")

I'll keep an eye on the issue, as this should only be a beta-workaround.

Do whatever you want

Now the TextureRect-Node needs two properties. First, we set it's Layout -> Anchors Preset to Full Rect. And also, we need to set the Texture -> Filter to Nearest Mipmap!

After we can resize our game's resolution however we like:

The TextureRect will scale it to fit our window dimensions, and produce a "pixelated" look!

Basically it makes our 1920x1080 game render through a 240x135 lense.

Why?

The main reason why you would use a SubViewport, is because of the ability to have your whole UI on a separate layer. You can also set the Viewport Width/Height to a small size and use Window Width/Height Override to make the actual window bigger - it will achieve the same look, but it will also upscale your UI and make it very hard to work with. Especially once you end up needing to make your font_size = 2px. 🤔