"Dusk" was not originally intended to be a full graphical remastering just five years after its release; when it was first unveiled at the 2022 PC Gaming Show, New Blood head Dave Oshry said, "No one asked for it, so we did it anyway." It was an update, and the "HD" moniker for the tastefully updated weapon and enemy models was rather a bit of a stretch... I saw the trailer for Dusk HD and was like, 'Ha ha, it's 'Dusk' and it's HD, holy crap,'" David "Garumin" Bonin told me in a recent interview

. [But] I intuitively thought, 'Oh my God, I'm not going to do that. And so began this strange obsession to put my personal project aside and just dig in."

Dusk HD started out with a much simpler mandate: New Blood just wanted to include some of Dusk's long-awaited Steam Workshop support and a modder-friendly SDK, plus a few mods of its own. It had been a long time since we promised Workshop support, so we needed to really solidify this. Let's put in our own mods."

Inspired by the teaser for 2022's "Dusk HD," which at that point was mostly the work of "New Blood" developer Cody Lambert, Garumin took the assets of the famously lo-fi shooter "Dusk HD" and added I started to make it hi-fi and treat it like a second job, and after creating over 100 objects and textures, I thought, "I might as well call the team and see what they think."

I was so impressed with the quality of the work that I decided to take a look at the game and see what they thought.

The response from New Blood, as you might imagine at this point, was very positive; Garu approached us and said, "Hey, we're actually working on HD versions of all the assets in the game, want to take a look?" And that was it," said Dave Oshry. Like most of the people who got to work on New Blood, he just bugged us until we said yes."

Garmin evaluated the individual models and textures of "Twilight" and began to revamp them, either working directly on creator David Szymanski's original assets or starting from scratch with the originals he had on hand. The process required constant revision, with Szymanski adding critiques, and New Blood developer Ben "Zombie" Mohr said that from all the changes, a "model graveyard" was created.

"We all decided, 'Enough is enough, let's just get on with it,'" said Oshry, although the add-on did not reach players until December 2023, after a teaser for "Dusk HD" was released at PCGS in 2022, With its commitment to quality and meticulous evolution of "Dusk's" original art style, the HD version avoids the pitfalls that many FPS remastering projects tend to fall into.

On the other side of the planet from Half-Life 2's infamous FakeFactory Cinematic Mod, PCG contributor Noa Smith likened the jump from Dusk to HD to the difference between the graphics of 1997 and 2004. He likens it to a retro reinterpretation of Dusk's look in much the same way, which blends perfectly with the original art.

"We could have stopped in a lot of ways and people would have been like, 'Oh, that's pretty cool,'" Oshry said. But we decided to go all the way. And so 'Twilight HD' grew into this beast."