Voxatron
lexaloffle.com104 points by lsferreira42 a day ago
104 points by lsferreira42 a day ago
Unfortunately, development is essentially dead afaik. Pico-8, originally just a prototype/development playground for Voxatron, became an instant hit and totally eclipsed Voxatron and now gets all the development hours, now shared with Picotron, which is an even newer product detracting from Voxatron. It's a total shame too, because I'd seen lots of demos of it on volumetric displays[1] which look amazing.
I wonder if zep (the creator) ran into technical issues at some point. The voxels are actual voxels in the sense that the painter’s algorithm is used to splat the voxel grid on the screen. Afaik, he mentioned that there was a lot of optimization needed to get the 60 fps out of it.
I recommend the Picotron, their newest fantasy software. It is a full fantasy workstation. It has no upper limit on game size and can export native binaries for the big three OSes. You could, in theory, publish a full game with it.
I've been working in Picotron to go through this "program your own Puyo Puyo" book Sega published... it's a very fun environment to work in.
You can boot it up, fullscreen it and totally LARP programming... I guess an amiga with nicer color pallettes?
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=166998#p strawberry_src is a fun editor to use for all of this
I remember playing this probably 10-12 years ago with Minecraft's creator Notch donated a bunch of money to their HumbleBundle campaign. It was pretty early alpha back then, and it seems like the main pivot has been to make it more of a platform for user-created games, rather than a game itself. Interesting!
Related. Others?
Vision of the future: Voxatron's high-priced gamble (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11189329 - Feb 2016 (1 comment)
The Humble Voxatron Debut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3178802 - Oct 2011 (39 comments)
Game Preview: Voxatron - voxel-based, destructible environment, 8bit soundtrack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2070025 - Jan 2011 (65 comments)
Is it a game, a console, or collection of games? Because the main page and FAQ say different things.
It's probably all of the above; can empathize with pitching something as unconventional as this. But it might make for a stronger presentation if there was a single framing throughout the site.
You're right, it is confusing. I wrote a whole comment and deleted it because I thought I knew what it was.
Pico-8 is a fantasy console, and Picotron is a workstation for that console.
Voxatron is a (1) fantasy console and (2) a collection of games but also (3) a game with (4) a game named "Voxatron Story" set in the (5) Voxatron Universe (??)
I played around with this years ago but I do not know where I purchased it so I can't say more. I remember playing around a bit but I don't remember Voxatron Story or anything else of that matter, only the cartridges.
Let me just correct you on something, Picotron is not a workstation for the Pico-8. Pico-8, Picotron and Voxatron are all different beasts. All three allow you to make programs (mostly games) and play them but you cannot play a pico-8 game on picotron and vice-versa. All three have a feature to allow you to download games directly on the device. And all three allow you to export your games as standalones. Pico-8 is a console, akin to a gameboy, while picotron is more like a computer. You can make games, but programs too. The whole user space is written inside of it.
It started as a game, and grew into a fantasy console.
It's by the same person who created pico-8, if you're familiar with that.
I bought the Humble Bundle for this in like 2011, and I played it a bit, but I ended up having a lot more fun with the included Pico-8 that came a bit later.
I think primarily I just found it a lot more approachable than anything else.
I love PICO-8 too. There are so many games, and they’re all free to play, with the source code available to explore or modify. Games are also reltively easily published online. Some PICO-8 games are genuine works of art. I’m always impressed by how creative people become when working within tight constraints. I wish I’d had something like this when I was a kid. I always recommend Pico-8 to like minded folks, sometimes kids.
I used to volunteer at a program in my local library that was designed to get kids into tech. They wanted someone to teach programming.
I bought like ten Pico-8 licenses for it [1], and used that to teach some simple programming. I figured that a simple platform like Pico-8 is still "real" programming, but you can go from "zero to viewable product" very quickly, which would be more fun for the kids; certainly less frustrating than trying to teach about vertex shaders and Vulkan.
Sadly none of the kids really took to it, but that's probably more of a criticism of how I was teaching than any issues with Pico-8.
[1] It wasn't actually my money. My employer at the time was willing to reimburse me
I’m a huge fan of lexaloffle. And while I’m more of a 2D guy, I have used voxatron in the past. It’s a great editor, it runs on almost any hardware requirements, and is versatile enough that you can program anything you want with it. Besides lua, you can also program in a no-code paradigm that I found incredibly clever. Your games can be quite lengthy and feature-full, and you build them easily for web.
Years ago I had hoped Voxatron and voxel-ish games inspired by it would have taken off more. I wonder why it hasn't saturated the indie game scene more.
One of our earliest Humble Bundles featured Voxatron as did the Humble Mozilla Bundle (where Voxatron was featured as a snippet on the Firefox home page). Will always have a soft spot for Voxatron.
While in Japan last year for Tokyo Game Show, I got to grab lunch with Joseph, the creator. He is an awesome dude.
that website is doing itself no favor. I could read the whole thing and still didn't fully understand what they are selling.
> Voxatron is a fantasy console and collection of games made entirely out of voxels (little colourful cubes, kind of). The Alpha version comes with an arena shooter and action-adventure cartridges as well as powerful design tools to make your own voxelly games.
What part of that is hard to understand?
What is a fantasy console? Is this just software? If it's just software, is the fantasy console some kind of meta game or emulator?
It's not clear at all.
It is an emulator for a console that does not exist in real life. People make games for this "console" because they are fun to play and fun to program.
The same developer made PICO-8, which is better known: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Lol well make that the headline!
I sometimes think that passionate nerds love their niche so much they forget that other people might not have the foggiest of what they're talking about.
Happens on github README.md files all the time.
I wonder what came of all the cool voxel engines that were in development by indie devs and teams not long ago..
Maybe that space can be revisited with AI assistance now?