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?
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.