Voxels

Yeah, yeah, I know, not really getting anywhere with the games. S'bad, but I'll get back to it.

I've been writing a voxel editor recently.
Voxel's aren't an easily concept to explain, although they're a simple concept to understand. In essence a voxel is a 3D pixel. That is a standard bitmap you create in paint is made up of pixels along the x and y dimensions, voxels add a z dimension allowing for easy 3D rendering.

So, I've written a (currently) simple editor for building voxel art with the intention of using it in my future games.
Right now the editor isn't much use for more than simple voxelart. I've been test-driving the editor for most of today and know there's about half a dozen features that need adding to its toolbox.
So, without further ado, this is what I managed yesterday:


For those not in the know, it's called a Menger Sponge which is a fairly basic cube fractal. This is taken to the 3rd iteration and contains 8000 cubes of which I clicked every bloody one (and don't I know it!)

So, will be adding some basic things like copy and paste, colour fill and keyboard shortcuts.
Also need to compress the voxel save files as a 27x27x27 image such as this one clocks in at 9.5MB.
At that point I'll make a simple video explaining more about the editor and if people are very lucky I might release it.

So what is the point in all this? Well it's to develop an art style for projects 3 and 4. Hoping having some artwork to play with will motivate me to make a move on them.

I also might have a try at doing some simple pure-animation using some voxels, will see how the games go first though.

Discussion on future projects

Since I've effectively finished Hoshi now, which is effectively project 2 but will be the first released, I thought I'd better start looking at ideas for future projects.

I do have a fairly large accumulation of game ideas, but most are too big for a month project and are more in the 6 month to 2 year time frame which I'm best staying away from for now.

So, what will fit in a month? Well, I have a ideas for 2 platformers, but I lack the graphics and level design experience to manage these properly in a month. Both would (ideally) need level editors which would be a project in and of itself.
So, I'll be leaving these for now, but I'll come back to them.

So I've decided on two relatively boring concepts for projects three and four and I'll give you the reasoning for them:
Project three will be an arena shooter (player in the middle of a single room with a gun that can shoot in 8 directions with enemies approaching from every direction). I estimate this will take around 2 weeks to write the code, but the sprites will take a long while as I'm hopeless at pixel art, but the entire point of this project is to improve that aspect.

Project Four will be a single-room-platformer. Classic examples being Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy from the 8-bit era. Again I'm not expecting more than around 2 weeks to write the main code and another week for a level editor. Some artwork will be re-used from project 3 (I may make this a sequel of sorts). The primary goal of this project is to experiment in level design and see what I can learn.

So, there you have it, projects three and four. Estimated (but not solid) release dates will be mid-July for 3 and mid-August for 4.