Quick Look: Voxatron

Cool!

Another good humble indie bundle game.

looks nuts

First..

Yay *download*

Voxels!

Time to find out what this game is all about.

@Salarn said:

Cool!

Curse ye!

how were you so quick... god damn it

voxels are quite neat

I'm glad to see this given a quick look. I had considered tweeting/messaging the staff about doing one, but figured they would be too busy this time of year.

Reminds me of 3D Dot Game Heroes alittle.

Edit: The more I watch the more it reminds ALOT of it.

Already have it. It's so awesome.

Comanche!

Sorry, everytime I hear "Voxel" I instantly think of Comanche....ahhh good days

This looks freaking awesome.

ah voxels .... anyone remember Outcast?

at 10 minute mark. Nice job Jeff! Now you're thinking with voxels...

Stunning!

Seriously, there's some awesome indie developers out there.

W-why do I suddenly have the urge to be vomited on by a voxel? D:

Hey Jeff, you can use the numpad to shoot in 8 directions as well if you want to go pure keyboard, I find it easier than using the mouse.

I drive a Vauxhall.

Fucking right, Voxitron.

Been playing this so much. It's great.

You are a bad person if you don't get the Humble Bundle including this, Blocks that Matter and The Binding of Isaac.

It's pay-what-you-want and for a good cause.

Doesn't look like it controls all that great, and selling an alpha version of a game is... weird.

Yo son, check out my voxels.

The shader they use really looks great together with the voxel graphics.

I guess I'm still getting used to this...while it's not really using voxels in its purest form (we're looking into a sandbox of voxels, instead of the entire game environment taking place in a voxel field), the theory is definitely there.

Voxels have been around for a really long time. As far as I know, it's most common use today is for scientific applications, whether it be topography, medicine, or micro-scale stuff. As for use in games, it never really went anywhere. I'm not sure why....was it taxing on the CPU? The most common use of voxels in games was making terrain. The first Delta Force game used it, an old PC game, Retribution, used it for the entire game environment. I hear Crysis uses voxels for environments.

Perhaps voxels are harder to work with than polygons. I'd really like to know.

Reminds me of 3D Dot Game Heroes.

If someone can build a helicopter in this game that flips over and crashes when you try to fly it then it will be the best voxel game.

For some reason this reminds me of the cartoon "Bump in the Night". I know this isn't claymation, but that's all I could think of when watching this.

Yay! VInny and Jeff QL's are the best.

Looks amazing. Is it resource intensive in any way? Looks like a fun timewaster to stick on a netbook.

@Buckfitches: Not at all. Its a peice of piss to play on a computer

@Buckfitches said:

Looks amazing. Is it resource intensive in any way? Looks like a fun timewaster to stick on a netbook.

I loaded it up on my 2-year-old netbook with 1 GB RAM, Atom 1.6 ghz processor, and Intel 950 integrated graphics. It ran absolutely fine at native resolution although the editor was pretty slow. So, no, it's not resource intensive.

Also, since it's just voxels, the filesize is absolutely tiny.

Bought this yesterday and found it pretty tough getting the shooting down on the keyboard expecting that to be a criticism from this Quick Look. Only to realise you can use the mouse to shoot -.-

Anyway this games great and i'm really enjoying Blocks That Matter and The Binding of Isaac.. I've bought a lot of games from the Humble Bundle but they've never performed as well as these three on my Mac =D

I bought it but haven't played yet, looks awesome!

Voxel based remake of Smash T.V anyone?

@MoseSSesoM said:

Reminds me of 3D Dot Game Heroes alittle.

Edit: The more I watch the more it reminds ALOT of it.

Right?

I think I'mma have to download this thing.

This game good.

This looks pretty goddamn rad.

@ryanrulez said:

I drive a Vauxhall.

VXR8?

This is surprisingly calming and fun to watch in a weird way.

This seems like a pretty cool thing.

It's also part of that interesting growing trend of selling games that are still in progress. Makes me wonder how fat that will go.

For some reason I can't help but think of those old claymation pengu TV shows whenever I see this.

@Marcness said:

I guess I'm still getting used to this...while it's not really using voxels in its purest form (we're looking into a sandbox of voxels, instead of the entire game environment taking place in a voxel field), the theory is definitely there.

Voxels have been around for a really long time. As far as I know, it's most common use today is for scientific applications, whether it be topography, medicine, or micro-scale stuff. As for use in games, it never really went anywhere. I'm not sure why....was it taxing on the CPU? The most common use of voxels in games was making terrain. The first Delta Force game used it, an old PC game, Retribution, used it for the entire game environment. I hear Crysis uses voxels for environments.

Perhaps voxels are harder to work with than polygons. I'd really like to know.

Crysis uses a Voxel Map instead of a Heightmap to generate terrain. This allows easy access to stuff like over-hangs and allows people to easily carve out caves in the map editor. There are no voxels being rendered in-game.

There's a lot of reasons why Voxels went nowhere. They were starting to sound like a big thing, Outcast's first screenshots came out and wowed people, the gaming press heralded voxels as the next big thing after polygons (polygons have only been used for a very short time in gaming, so it was believable at the time that they were just a temporary step to the nex thing). Then Outcast was delayed, no other games used it, and by the time Outcast came out the craze died down and people were playing Half-Life and looking forward to Quake 3 instead. All voxel implementations had weird bumpy looks, and they couldn't figure out how to texture them right. Most important of all, they couldn't animate them as reliably as polygonal models. It was a LOT harder. Everybody have been using polygons for the last 5-10 years, all the artists were already used to them, every guide and tutorial in existence referred to polygons and not voxels, so nobody wanted to put in the effort to learn them and to make them look good. Dedicated 3D graphics hardware focusing entirely on Polygon rendering made its debut and nobody wanted to switch over to different voxel-focused hardware. Polygons won because they were the first on the field.

This has been your PC game history lesson of the day kids, remember it for the upcoming test!

Call me crazy, but even though they play nothing alike, I see this game and think: 3D Dot Game Heroes.

@RuneseekerMireille said:

Call me crazy, but even though they play nothing alike, I see this game and think: 3D Dot Game Heroes.

If you're crazy then so am I because I thought the same thing.

Neat.

Neat little shooter. I just got the Humble thing and think its cool. They do need to change the controls like Jeff said and have WASD control movement and arrowkeys shoot. But still alright with its currnet mouse controls.

Bought it a few days ago. :) love it