I’d like to see Voxatron succeed, not only because it’s the most interesting indie game I’ve played for a long time, but also because I’ve admired Lexaloffle for years, since I became dangerously obsessed with his beautiful game Zen Puzzle Garden, and I like to think that quiet inventiveness and careful dedication deserve the occasional reward.
I heard on Saturday that a paper I wrote with Lexaloffle’s Joseph White (and Martyn Amos) has been accepted for publication. We prove that Zen Puzzle Garden is NP-complete. It’s based on a post I made years ago to the old ZPG BBS. Joseph immediately understood the proof, and suggested a significant improvement.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ipl.2011.10.016 http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.2104v1
Even odder, once I finish writing this, I'm still not heading over there to buy the bundle, even though I could only spend $0.01.
One game a month is a little more sustainable. Hopefully there will still be a big packs once in a while.
Is it better or worse? Not sure. Though it is telling the HIB guys did not even record a trailer for this one.
> Get Voxatron's future content and gameplay updates.
Frantic-ish action.
Plays like Robotron. (hold down fire key to strafe)
Voxel effects are awesome.
Great sound, much less harsh than Robotron.
Lots of power-ups.
Very fun game.
Here are two bits I found especially interesting:
“In general, I don't think it's a good idea to keep a project in a constantly presentable/releasable state. For technical reasons, it encourages short term hacks and a reluctance to take things apart and design them cleanly. And especially from a creative position, once something is observed by other people it often seems to freeze into an unmoveable state, in the expectations of players and the mind of the designer.”
“Voxatron is based on a virtual 128x128x64 display. It's a buffer of 3d video memory that is rendered out to the screen at the end of each frame, much as an old-school 2d display is. You can POKE bytes into the virtual memory, and they come out as voxels. I don't compromise on this — even the menus are drawn into the voxel display. Hopefully one day I can get hold of a real physical 128x128x64 display and play Voxatron on it with almost no modification.”
What is the verb for google plus? +1-ing?
When write on Google+, the submit button is labelled "Share".
"Voxatron is based on a virtual 128x128x64 display. It's a buffer of 3d video memory that is rendered out to the screen at the end of each frame, much as an old-school 2d display is. You can POKE bytes into the virtual memory, and they come out as voxels. I don't compromise on this -- even the menus are drawn into the voxel display. Hopefully one day I can get hold of a real physical 128x128x64 display and play Voxatron on it with almost no modification."
The game is a top-down shooter in the vein of Robotron, but with 3D environments. It features volumetric equivalents to many basic 2D graphics operations: a scrolling background, sprites, animations, particle systems, physics, etc.
Everything is destructable too. If you shoot enough holes in an object, it will collapse in a heap of voxels.
It even includes a level editor.
The game looks fantastic and I've never heard of anything like it. If you are even remotely interested in games or realtime graphics, you need to see this.
Someone should build an iTunes for indie games, or something.
Or uh, iTunes Store?
From the About section: Indievania is an online indie game marketplace for independent developers to sell their games directly to players, where 100% of the cost of the game goes to the developer.
Voxatron is too humble. I just went to the page. I had my browser window pretty big... taking up most of a 21" monitor.
Here's what I could tell about Voxatron:
1. It's called voxatron
2. It's "pay what you want".
3. It supports charity
4. It is DRM free
5. The people behind voxatron thought a sorta mincraftish image would communicate something significant to me.
6. It seems like it can run on a Mac.
I think these are all, clearly, features you wanted to communicate, and you succeeded in doing so very well.
However, I then hit my back button because, in the time it took me to grasp on that, I realized I had no clue what Voxatron was.... and I have spent too much time trying to figure things like that out in the past on other sites such that I've gotten the impression that if I don't get it right away, I likely never will. (Seriously, I can't tell you how many times I've followed links from google, gotten to a corporate site, spent 5-10 minutes there, unable to make heads or tails-- when I got there because, according to the query I crafted for google, google thinks this company is selling what I wanted to buy RIGHT THEN. The barrier is much lower for links on HN.)
Is it a game? Is it a voice transcoder? Is it an auto tuner? Is it for musicians? Is it for kids playing around with digital signal processing?
Give me a one line description of what voxatron is or does, without too much hyperbole, and put it front and center, maybe right under or replacing the word "voxatron" where it is now on the page. And if there IS Such a line, and I completely missed it, then I think your page layout is too busy and it caused me to overlook it.
You got my 11 seconds, but didn't get me very far down the funnel to conversion.
Again, with all respect, and hopes that this is helpful-
Be the first to tackle this voxel-based, old-school-gone-new platform shooter. Jump into the Voxatron alpha and shoot your way through twenty challenging areas filled with blocky baddies, destructible toys, and palliative powerups.
Get Voxatron's future content and gameplay updates. As a customer of the Humble Voxatron Debut, you'll receive access to all of Lexaloffle's future updates to Voxatron: levels, characters, and more!
Level editor included, with monster creation tools on the way! After conquering the alpha adventure, check out the “BBS Levels” for instant-access to user-created content. Want to make your own voxel masterpiece? Voxde -- the Voxatron level editor -- is included with every purchase, granting you the ability to create mind-blowing new environments to share with the world. And soon, Lexaloffle plans to add monster creation tools for designing your own blocky bad guys to populate your creations.
Moreover, what percentage of the population is even aware that A) you can buy games to play on the computer, and B) that didn't come from a big box retailer? I'll tell you this -- it's very much in the minority, especially when you look at the 30-and-up crowd. Much older than that and the percentage of the population starts to approach zero.
I grew up with an Atari VCS 2600 (that my parents had bought for themselves), as did most others I know. However if I asked my parents -- or those of anyone I know -- what Steam was, they wouldn't think of anything other than water vapor. Humble Bundle? Not a chance.
I've heard of kids on the bus and subway recently, talking about "this new Steam thing". If kids aren't aware of it, how aware is the general population of something far more obscure? Not very.
IF people are tweeting this page, how many people who see that tweet are likely to follow it and have never heard of Humble Bundle before? So, they'd know even less than I would...
Someone below says it's an indie game. Maybe I'll take a look later.