I'm trying to find something and it's really bugging me that I can't.
Here's what I think I recall: the textures for the game Blade of Darkness were hand-painted, like on paper, with oil paint or gouache. The reason I think I remember this is because there used to be a website up with this huge collection of textures to download, much higher resolution versions than were in the game. I want to find this website again. Annoyingly, if I try to find info about this, I just find AI upscaled texture mods for the game 🥴
I believe these textures were used as one of the default texture sets in the Cube 2: Sauerbraten game engine.
I believe the website was the personal website of the artist.
I'm currently looking up every artist who worked on the game and the credits of sauerbraten to see what I can find. It's entirely possible that I'm misremembering what game it was from originally!
But can somebody with good internet sleuth skills help me? I feel more and more like a dumb-ass about digging up info these days, even about things from fairly recent history. Everybody keeps telling me that search is getting worse, but I think it's not just that. My skills have gotten a little rusty so I'd be open to any tips.
We got 'em!. It's the work of one David Gurrea according to this site. These are beautiful, to me. I love that they're high enough resolution here that you can make out the physical detail of the medium, but they're not specifically painterly looking. They look like game textures! The flat but semi-realistic style actually reminds me of the art on board game components from a certain era.
There's some other interesting details, some of these are clearly collages from bits of the same painting, there's a bit of digital post work, but with sharp, aliased edges. Details that would get lost when down-scaling them to game assets anyway!
