Beerman's adventures in voxel-land

I ran across something rather pretty the other day on Hacker News :

Ooh, shiny.

Which reminded me of a a couple of things.

• Voxels look bloody lovely.
• Particularly for the sort of simple, gameplay-heavy retro stuff that I like making.
• I should make something with voxels, shouldn’t I?

I’m thinking that as a handy distraction from avoiding work on my current project, building something simple and shooty with voxels could be all kinds of fun *

So, using this handy guide as a starting point I think I’m starting to get a grasp on the basic concept.

Yep, those are voxels alright!

I’m thinking to keep things simple, a semi-fixed camera implementation (camera can translate but not rotate, so I don’t need to do as much work on visibility-culling) would be a good place to start, and lends itself nicely to a whole bunch of fun retro games.

So, what would make a good first project? It needs to be fairly simple gameplay-wise, and ideally involve both 3D and some degree of screen scrolling (otherwise I could get away with a totally fixed camera). It’s something that’s been on my things-to-remake list for a while. And conveniently, it’s the very first thing I thought of when I saw the preview image from the voxeloid video above.

I’m gonna take a crack at Juno First!

* Yeah, I should probably write about that at some point as well. Been working on the damn thing for half a year now, maybe I should try actually, telling people about it or something…

** offer void where prohibited, value of fun may decrease, we advise you consult a registered fun adviser before making entertainment related decisions