Cheap game design tricks revealed: from Halo to Half Life

Modern game development software like Unreal Engine is allowing developers to create more realistic graphics more easily. But while technological advances can take developers closer to realising their full visions, sometimes it's technological limitations (and time and budget limitations) that spark creativity.

With a little technical ingenuity, shortcuts can help developers reduce time, money and performance costs. One developer has been rounding up some of the nifty little tricks used in classic games, from Halo to Half Life (see our feature on getting started in game design if you're looking to start work on your own title).

speaking of cool cheap effects: the shadow from the ceiling fan in Robo Recall is not a real shadow or even a light function or even a decal, it's a rotating translucent mesh
— @joewintergreen.com (@joewintergreen.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T00:24:56.202Z

Joe Wintergreen is director of Impromtu Games and senior technical designer at RiffRaff. He previously worked at WolfEye Studios on their first game, Weird West. In a thread on BlueSky, he delved into some classic examples of innovative solutions to graphic problems like simulating motion blur, reflections and fire.

He starts off noting that the first Halo game faked motion blur on the Warthog's tyres. Instead of blurring the wheels in real time using complex shader calculations that would have taxed the original Xbox's processing power, they swapped the high-detail wheel texture with a pre-blurred one when the wheels reached a certain speed.

It seems this was a common trick, as other devs point out in the comments that it was used for the helicopter blades on Far Cry 3 and the teleporter sequence in Half-Life 2.

half-life blue shift does a classic fake reflection where it's just the same room under a glass floor. lots of old games did this, but ue1 games didn't! deus ex had real reflections. cool
— @joewintergreen.com (@joewintergreen.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T00:24:56.046Z

Other tidbits that Joe mentions include the faked reflection in Half-Life: Blue Shift. This was created by putting the same room under a glass surface. The Unreal Engine 3 tech demo Epic Citadel did the same thing.

As for the Zen Garden UE4 mobile tech demo, it looks like the swimming pool might have a refraction shader, but Joe says it's literal wobble in the underwater concrete. An earlier UE4 tech demo had fire which was created with a static mesh rather than particles.

the even earlier ue4 mobile demo that was very exciting and impressive in early 2014 had this cool fire (not a great shot of it) which has no particles, it's a static mesh, moving its verts around in the shader and scrolling a texture around. looks great
— @joewintergreen.com (@joewintergreen.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T00:24:56.276Z

Hey you know the VR game Robo Recall? One of the better VR games imo. But the main thing is It has that classic thing: an office chair with one fucked wheel, so when you roll it it kinda pivots extra much around that wheel. On the physics asset, the wheels are all capsules except that one's a cube
— @joewintergreen.com (@joewintergreen.com.bsky.social) 2026-02-10T00:24:55.859Z

There are plenty of other examples of these economising shortcuts in game design. Some might result in compromises, but many go unnoticed by most players. Remember Driver? It stunned PS1 players in 1999 with the scale of its drivable cities for which devs used photographs as textures.

Do you have a favourite game design trick or shortcut? Let us know in the comments.

Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.

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