Voxatron

[Kolzig]

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A friend sent me an email about this game yesterday.

Game made entirely out of voxels. Everything can be destroyed in the game and it's an arena shooter.

This looks pretty awesome and is said to come out later this year for PC, Mac.

Technology is totally different, but art seems to remind me so much of Minecraft, the game I have never played, but have seen a lot of videos and screenshots about.

[toblix]

It'll be interesting to see if the game is actually voxel-based, or if it's just a voxel style. Anyway, it looks pretty neat, though a bit actiony for my own tastes.

[Chuckpebble]

I'd hit that.

[Tanukitsune]

It reminds me of 3D Dot Game Heroes! :3

[shammack]

This game is the new thing to buy on Humble Bundle and I recommend doing so. I'm not a huge fan of this style of shooter in general, but this is really charming, includes some light platforming and puzzle elements, has a level editor, and looks gorgeous. And you can set your own price.

Apparently you're buying an alpha and getting all future updates (the Minecraft model, basically), but what you get is already very playable and polished. My only complaint is that the aiming can feel kind of sluggish, although I suspect that may be related to my trying to use a trackball.

[elmuerte]

I don't like the aiming mechanism. It's really annoying.

[shammack]

Apparently you're not even meant to use "twin-stick" aiming. The default is to just shoot in the direction you're facing, and by holding down the key you lock the aim in that direction and can strafe. That feels really weird to me, though. Using the numpad to shoot sounds reasonable, but I haven't tried it that way yet.

[Murdoc]

Yeah, I like the style, I like the destruction and enemies, but the shooting could be a little snappier.

The face a direction and shoot was impossible and the hold shoot down then move is works and is fun, but weird and disjointed. It's alpha and not sure that shooting was so deliberate its their vision or they are trying something new and will figure out how to make it work or scrap it all together... I guess we'll just wait and see.

Also, when did voxels come to mean cube style? Am I crazy or did I used to play old voxel games that weren't cubey? I think the new voxel game=cubes is just as more art direction than technology, isn't?

I think it works for this though, its made to feel like an old school pixel game. which they could render the whole screen though(or is that another design decision?)

Either way I like it.

[shammack]

  Murdoc said:

The face a direction and shoot was impossible and the hold shoot down then move is works and is fun, but weird and disjointed. It's alpha and not sure that shooting was so deliberate its their vision or they are trying something new and will figure out how to make it work or scrap it all together... I guess we'll just wait and see.

Apparently it was a deliberate choice:

  Quote

ok, I realise 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.

... but he's gotten a lot of complaints about the controls, so he's making them configurable in the next version. I don't really see what he's worried about with jumping; I just use spacebar for that and it's fine.

(Source: this blog post, which also has some details about how the voxel renderer works)

[Nachimir]

I actually enjoyed the strafe locking of the controls. Tricky, but made immediate sense to me.

[ThunderPeel2001]

Couldn't he just configure it for controllers to use dual sticks? A trigger button could be used for jumping.

[Murdoc]

  ThunderPeel2001 said:

Couldn't he just configure it for controllers to use dual sticks? A trigger button could be used for jumping.

I really hope so but he makes a good point about the reasons behind it too.

It just feels a bit unnatural to me, but its minor.