Most small teams chasing a distinctive visual style on a tight budget reach for generative AI. Payne Robinson and Giovanni Fim, the two-person team behind the survival dungeon crawler Medium Rare, reach for stock photo libraries instead — and in a new 80.lv interview, they explain why that constraint produced a style AI couldn’t easily fake.
The pipeline: collage first, pixels last
Fim, the project’s artist, builds most environments by combining stock photographs into a scene and painting directly over the composite in Photoshop. Player and creature models come from Creative Commons 3D asset libraries; backgrounds are frequently pulled from stock video frames; most inventory items are stock PNGs, repainted just enough to fit. Nothing in that stack is generated — it’s assembled, like a scrapbook, from pre-existing photographic and video material.
The final step is what the team calls “crushing”: downscaling everything to a chunky resolution and mapping it to a per-area color palette, a process more commonly known as posterization, done in Aseprite and PixelOver. Crushing is what unifies photographs, 3D renders, and stock PNGs into something that reads as one consistent pixel-art world instead of a visibly mismatched collage. Fog noise, warping, and a depth-of-field shader stand in for animation the small team doesn’t have time to hand-draw frame by frame.
Why photomontage instead of a brush or a prompt
Robinson, who also handles sound design, describes the goal as evoking “dread instead of horror” — the posterized, slightly-off photographic quality is meant to feel playful on the surface while making the dungeon crawler’s darker moments land harder by contrast. Building the look from real photographic material rather than a hand-painted style or a generative model gives the images an uncanny, almost-real texture that a from-scratch illustration or an AI output would have to work much harder to reproduce.
It’s also a practical answer to a common indie problem: a two-person art and sound team can’t out-animate or out-illustrate a studio, but photomontage lets them compete on visual strangeness instead — the thing the team says draws curiosity rather than the thing that costs the most labor. Medium Rare, from the studio ExeCo (Robinson and co-founder Peter Tinaglia, with Fim on art), is built in Godot 4.6 and has a free demo live on Steam.