Lately I’ve been thinking about Voxatron, an incomplete yet fun little top-down-ish shooter game from 2011. I love the way it looks and plays, so I’ve been wondering if there are any other games with the same aesthetic?
It’s a bit hard to explain, but what I liked specifically about Voxatron was how the characters and the environment were animated. Everything seemed to snap to an invisible three-dimensional grid, or in other words, voxels didn’t rotate. Here’s an example.
What I’m not looking for is a game that is made of voxels, but is animated like polygons, if that makes sense. Like this. I’m not really sure what term to use, because searching for “voxel games” was not very fruitful for me. Search results encompassed everything from Minecraft to Severed Steel.
I imagine animating a game in such a way would be super time consuming, but I still have to ask: are there any games that fit this criteria?
Here is a list of open source voxel stuff of those I’d say Veloren likely would interest you the most.
it sounds like you want an internal voxel grid and for all the art and animations to respect that grid. I don’t have any recs but I’m posting in solidarity because I feel the same way about pixel art games
Much appreciated nonetheless. And yes, that’s precisely what I’m looking for.
there was 3D Dot Game Heroes for the PS3. I think that sorta qualifies? No other games are coming to mind.
It definitely qualifies! Alas, I’ve already played it. It still astounds me that the game wasn’t ported to other platforms, it was good!
I’m not sure why this style isn’t more common! My guess is that the main indie engines (Unreal and Unity) aren’t built for it without some heavy modification, and so if a dev is interested in this style, they settle for voxel graphics that don’t snap to a voxel grid.
I know, I would love to see more games using that style! Then again, I completely understand that it might be easier for some devs to use skeletal animation on voxel models instead of making a static voxel model for every frame of animation.
Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for, but Vangers is a game that uses voxels AFAIK.
8-bit Armies/Hordes by Petroglyph? Westwood style RTS games (Dune II, Command & Conquer) by folks who worked on those games.
Edit: never mind, these games are animated IIRC. Just keeping this reaction up in case someone else is interested in these kind of games.
Perhaps not exactly what your looking for, but there is an indie puzzle game based off picross 3d (one of my all time favorite puzzle games) that uses voxel styling
I loved Picross 3D 2 (or Round 2 or whatever it was called) on the 3DS! As you surmised, it’s not what I’m looking for, but I’ll try to snag it the first chance I get. Thanks!
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