Voxatron
From Lexaloffle Games

Official Voxatron Page: http://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php
Lexaloffle Twitter Page: http://twitter.com/lexaloffle



I originally found out about Voxatron a few months ago when Notch (Minecraft creator) linked to a preview video on his Twitter page. Voxatron's worlds are made up completely of blocks (more technically, 3-D pixels called 'voxels') and are fully destructable. It's part Minecraft, part Robotron 2084, part action, part adventure, part puzzle-solving, part To Be Continued (as the engine develops further). It's really a little bit of everything.


Here are the preview videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q-xqI8Cm5A


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epwh1qJVoB8


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKdRri5jSMs




The game is following Minecraft's developmental model - ie. pay for alpha, get all future updates free plus get to test drive the game as it develops.

I just bought the alpha of this game from the new Humble Indie Bundle @ http://www.humblebundle.com. It's still early in development but it comes with a rudimentary world editor (monster editor and script editor are on the way), a sample adventure world (to show off what is possible already), and an arcade mode, as well as the ability to create/upload/play user-made levels. After playing through the sample adventure world a couple of times, I can say that this engine has potential, and really that is the devs' goal with this - to flesh out the engine to allow for all sorts of custom user-made stuff.



What the hell is a Humble Indie Bundle?
Humble Bundle site: http://www.humblebundle.com
Humble Bundle Twitter page: http://twitter.com/humble

Humble Bundles are a group of Indie games made available as a timed 'pay what you want' type of deal, and you are given DRM-free download links plus a free Steam key to add the Bundle games there, if they are there on Steam. (Voxatron is still in alpha so it likely won't be added to Steam until it is closer to completion.) The Bundles start off minimal, and more games are added as the duration of the Bundle offer goes on, until the Bundle offer ends. The list of games to be added to Bundles over time (if any, and how many) is left unknown to encourage impulse purchases. Real-time stats are kept on humblebundle.com of the average price for buy-ins, plus the highest buy-ins, as well as total sales, etc.. Those who purchase the Bundle get everything added to the Bundle after their purchase free of charge. Those who miss out on buying-in to the initial offering will have to exceed the average price for buy-ins up until their point of purchase, in order to get the extras added to the initial offering up until their point of purchase. Long story short - to get all of the Bundle as cheap as possible, you want to get in as early as possible. Other incentives can also be offered (total sales = extra goodies, etc.), but usually the >average price for extras is what is primarily done.

This particular Voxatron Humble Bundle will last for two weeks (already a couple of days in). A couple of other games have already been added, which means to get them (besides the initial offering, Voxatron Alpha, which by Humble Bundle rules is still 'pay what you want'), you will have to pay more than the average Bundle buying price from users. Future-added Bundle games after purchase - if there will be any added at all - will be free of charge.



Voxatron's Humble Bundle Preview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyQaS76k59g




The game is pretty fun even at this early stage. I enjoyed the sample world, although some parts were a little frustrating to figure out. Once I got the hang of it, and also memorized some of the strategies involved, I began having a real blast. The sample adventure world for the Voxatron Alpha is a bit short, but it really shows potential for the depth of the game itself down the road.


This particular Humble Bundle is already pretty popular sales-wise, which means there are already tons of Voxatron Let's Plays and feedback videos on YouTube. Some of the fun with the sample adventure world is figuring out the puzzles and strategies yourself, so if the game looks appealing to you, don't spoil yourself too much.

Lexaloffle Blog post about the current state of the game and its intentions for it:
http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=260

Quote:

Voxatron Alpha Now Available Voxatron's out! For the next 2 weeks you can grab the Alpha version exclusively from humblebundle.com. All future updates are available free of charge, and you can pay whatever you like for it. Also in Humble Bundle tradition you can choose how to split your payment between two kick-ass organisations: Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The game consists of a voxel and map editor, along with an arcade mode and a sample world ("Adventure Mode") which shows some of the things you can do with the current editor. In fact, all of the adventure mode was made with the editor (except for the dragon boss, which is a bundle of quick hacks). I've spent most of the development effort so far making sure the editor is powerful and easy to use. After a few hours, there are already some nice custom maps springing up in the BBS, and I can't wait to see what kind of whack things will come out of it. Where To Now? I certainly hope you enjoy the Alpha if you decide to grab a copy, but honestly -- this is only the beginning! My general notion of Voxatron is that it should be a playground in which you can experience a variety of styles of gameplay leveraging the voxel-based format. Part of this will happen in the editor -- as I add more features, people can make and share weirder and more interesting things. And part of it will be building out the main game world. What's The Fork? In general, I don't think it's a good idea to keep a project in a constantly presentable/releasable state. For technical reasons, it encourages short term hacks and a reluctance to take things apart and design them cleanly. And especially from a creative position, once something is observed by other people it often seems to freeze into an unmoveable state, in the expectations of players and the mind of the designer. It's better to keep everything as fluid as possible, allowing interesting possibilities to reveal themselves and position themselves as provisional assumptions that more interesting things can emerge from. So, where was I? The Fork! Yes -- so, given the scope of Voxatron it quickly became clear that to make it happen, I'd need to release it early. For such a user-driven game, it also makes sense to let the tools co-evolve the users. But to resolve this with the need to keep a healthy development process, I'll roughly split the development into two streams: - The editor and engine: These will be updated regularly (at least once a month). For the next couple of weeks, I'll be working mainly just on any technical problems people are having. At the moment there are issues with drifting controls and multi-monitor setups. After that I think the most requested and pressing feature is a monster designer, and the ability to re-skin the player & pickups. - The game world: This will remain mostly hidden until nearer completion. I'll be working with some very talented designers to build out the main game, and hopefully we can outdo whatever people are making in the editor. In both cases, all updates will be available for free to registered users (and accessible through the Humble Bundle games page). So How Does This Game Work? I'll post some technical notes on Voxatron here at some stage, but in brief: Voxatron is based on a virtual 128x128x64 display. It's a buffer of 3d video memory that is rendered out to the screen at the end of each frame, much as an old-school 2d display is. You can POKE bytes into the virtual memory, and they come out as voxels. I don't compromise on this -- even the menus are drawn into the voxel display. Hopefully one day I can get hold of a real physical 128x128x64 display and play Voxatron on it with almost no modification. The renderer is written in software (C + SDL). Each frame, scan through the virtual video memory back to front and look for voxels that have empty neighbors. If they are exposed, I transform the corners of a cube intro screen space and scan-render the polygon. Shadows are done with a traditional shadow-map but sampled with a filter to get the soft shadows. Fix The Controls! ok, I realize that it's weird to make a game that looks and sounds like a homage to Robotron without dual-stick control. I'm not going to be a dick about it -- there's a lot of demand for this and I'll add a dual stick option soon. But! There's a reason for it -- there is so much jumping in the game, and it is so central to the gameplay that jumping really needs to feel natural. I don't personally miss having a separate directional control for shooting, and any variation of dual-stick+jump that I tried felt extremely clumsy. Even in levels that are very robotron-esque (the first arena), it's vital to be able to hop over rubble, bullets, and especially into crowds of monsters to swipe a pickup. I think it's worse for the game to feel like "Robotron.. in 3D! With awkward jumping!" But as I say, although I feel the style of control is integral to the identity of the game, I'm not going to force you to use my ivory tower view of the controls. For now, you can try ASDW+mouse (even more odd), or the numpad for shooting if you have one. Voxatron Doesn't Work! It seems a good number of players are getting burnt by a sticky key problem (player drifts in one direction), and a couple of multi-monitor and Linux dependency issues. I'll do my best to resolve them quickly amongst the sleep deprived chaos that I'm experiencing right now. If you have a problem, and especially if you found a temporary work around to it, please feel free to make a quick post about it on the BBS or in the comments.

Grabbed this on the first day of the bundle for $1, now I get all the other games that come out in the bundle too without having to pay the average price

I feel a little bad for only paying that much, but I'm not sure I'd want to pay any more anyway. The graphics are sexy as hell but the gameplay, imo, is just not up to par :<

Either way for $1 I'm pretty happy with my purchase. Problem for me was that I already had the binding of isaac so that's 1/3 of the purchase gone. But for $1 (I know, this is getting repetitive) still pretty good.

As my current rig cannot play Bastion, and I would merely be buying it to play on my next PC, I am holding out on purchasing it in hopes that the Christmas Steam sales will have it as cheap or even cheaper than yesterday's sale. I've heard lots of great things about it.

I saw that you also purchased Costume Quest the other day. I did too. (Although that is also a game that won't run on my current PC.)

A new version of Voxatron is out (v0.1.4) with customizeable controls in the Options menu.