According to someone in YouTube who said to have tested an early version of the game, Dusk is made in Unity.
The sad truth is, most people who makes "retro style" games don't truly care about retro technology. They act (I'm judging their actions, not their words) as if "retro style" was a purely deliberate artistic expression, but it isn't.
I was googling for opinions about such stuff lately, and I agree with
these:
"good" low poly, it's the kind that hides it's polygons well and doesn't look low poly unless you look really hard.
Dusk doesn't even try to fit this criteria.
It's funny because new techniques could greatly enhance stuff like this game, that mouth I assume is a flat texture made to be viewed from the camera's angle but with current tech we could fake a low poly flat textured mouth and make it appear to have depth making it look consistent from any angle. we could even make it so that the edges of a model appear to be unailiased but match the texture resolution making characters appear to be 3d pixel art in a sense.
You will never see indies do anything like this.
Pseudo-polygon and pseudo-voxel textures, through something like relief mapping. This could be really cool to see, indeed. And requires thinking outside of the box, which people can't do when they define the "box" as an end in itself and not as a starting point.
Retro hardware was just a platform, a starting point, its constraints didn't dictate style choices despite of limiting the variety of tools that could be used. The styles developed back then were almost always the results of artists exploring the technical possibilities; they were results of exploration, not of mere deliberation. And this exploration, this act of discovering new possibilities, is what made them charming.
There will be a shift soon in the indie community to make low poly games.
But careful what you wish for.
A long time ago, making an indie 2D title was absolutely fine, but then more and more devs started to do it, a lot of devs just started to do it out of lazyness, not respecting the graphical style or having a set artstyle in mind when approaching 2D pixel art, resulting in both the 2D pixel art indie level to fall to miserable depths in terms of quality, and at the same time a massive kneejerk reaction against all 2D indie games by [...] in part the general public itself.
As more and more indie devs gravitate towards low poly in the future, you will see the same exact progression:
-A couple of main titles that become the posterchild for low poly modern indie games.
-Tons of titles will try to copy that.
-Many indie devs will start making low poly games out of lazyness.
-The market will be flooded with low poly indie games.
[...]
-The average person will start to associate indie games with low poly and start to dislike them in general.
-The next visual approach will become big and the cycle will start over again.
Screencap this, you'll have plenty of threads to post it in the coming years.
Sadly, I also see this coming. This is why I'm not too enthusiastic about my own retro game development. The public is already getting burned by "retro style" games that ends up being more like a parody than a homage. There's no way to be successful offering something of which the audience have already got a bad taste in their mouths.
I've got a lot more respect for low-fi indie games that don't try to compare themselves to something else. Games like
Pid, which despite being not excellent in visuals or technology, managed to think outside of the box and push its possibilities in an amazing way that truly fascinated me. Or games like
Sonic Robo Blast 2, which paid homage to the Sonic franchise by exploring new possibilities, rather than just remixing what had already been done.