Game Art Tricks (Simonschreibt)
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Description
Game Art Tricks is Simon Trümpler's long-running blog series on simonschreibt.de documenting visual techniques from shipped games. Posts reverse-engineer effects from titles such as GTA V, Diablo III, Zelda, Assassin's Creed, Fallout, and newer releases like Infinity Nikki and Cyberpunk 2077.
Topics include fake interiors, water, glow and lens flares, decals, stencil tricks, parallax fakes, color banding, LOD blending, explosions, vegetation, and UI rendered as geometry. Each entry explains what the game appears to do and how a similar result could be achieved under real-time constraints.
Trümpler also publishes Render Hell (an illustrated GPU pipeline overview), tech-art course materials, GDC and ADDON talk writeups, and personal project post-mortems. The detective-work methodology uses tools like RenderDoc and Intel GPA, described in his Tech Art Detective talk.
Articles are free on the blog in English, with an indexed numbered list now exceeding ninety entries. The tone is practical and artist-friendly while still naming specific buffers, shaders, and mesh tricks.
One of the most frequently shared tech-art blogs for learning how commercial games cheat visually; often recommended alongside Render Hell for understanding production VFX without studio insider access.