The Humble Voxatron Debut | Hacker News Reader

The Humble Voxatron Debut

humblebundle.com

75 pointssimonista39 comments

The developer’s blog post http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=260 has some more details about the game and the planned development process.

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.”

For those wondering what this game is all about, this is the interesting part:

"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.

I remember there being some discussion around the Humble Bundle brand getting "diluted" by the Frozenbyte bundle last time, and I have to wonder if that's becoming the case.

Yeah it seems like they're crowdsourcing game development now:

> Get Voxatron's future content and gameplay updates.

I'm not following you; in what sense is that crowdsourcing? I assume that the "future content" will be developed by the original developers, possibly using the revenue from this deal.

I think he meant crowd funding.

Thanks, that makes sense.

Agreed - at this point it's nothing more than a every so often flash sale with a name your own price system. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing - but I have far less interest in donating larger amounts "to support the community" when it's becoming a deal site - instead I am starting to get the mentality to get everything at the greatest deal I possibly can.

Your post made me realize something. Just like you, I'd previously been generous in my payment to "support the community". When I loaded up the page today and saw the offering, I mentally said "I don't have $20 to blow on this right now" and left the site. Until I read your post, I never even considered that I could just pay less than $20.

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.

On the other hand, I have $200 left to my name total, and I'm happily spending $1.00.

If $0.01 is all you can afford, there's no shame in it.

I was initially sceptical, but actually Frozen Synapse is quite a good game.

With the Frozen Synapse bundle, I had come to the conclusion that there is be sufficient market for the HIB to never stop running (eg, a new bundle every two weeks) if they only did one game at a time.

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.

In a selfish sort of way, I hope this discussion doesn’t end up being completely dominated by the question of whether the “Humble Bundle” offers are going downhill or whether their web page is well enough designed.

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

Voxatron.

  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.

I happily paid $10, as it's supporting both charities ($1.5 each) and the developer ($5.50).

Sorry for the hash tag in the url, it's not necessary but I figured we wanted a separate thread to discuss the new bundle. A mod can strip it off if desired.

Best quote from the humble bundle video: "Facebook share it, tweet it, Do whatever the verb of google plus-ing is."

What is the verb for google plus? +1-ing?

+1 is the action of approval (past tense: +1'd), however it's not very useful, as Humble Bundle re-uses their root URL for the page, so I had already done this.

When write on Google+, the submit button is labelled "Share".

I adore indie games.

Someone should build an iTunes for indie games, or something.

Like Steam or Desura?

Or uh, iTunes Store?

> The Desura client currently only works on Windows and Linux PCs. We are working on support for Mac. To be notified when support is added, please provide your email:

There's Indievania! (http://beta.indievania.com/)

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.

How is one game a 'bundle'?

You no longer have to be scratching your head about this one, they just added two games to the bundle. Misnomer no more.

The game is decently fun, but it was the art that sold me. The voxel style looks like one of those themes that developers rocking a low budget can pull off beautifully.

five bucks, ker-bought! I've been following the teaser videos for a while and am excited to have a chance to fool around in it.

"...do whatever the verb of Google plus-ing is" The laugh from that line alone was worth my purchase price.

Such an interesting social experiment. I am going to indulge my inner economist.

Bought it.

I wish you the best, whatever it is you are, so constructive feedback follows:

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-

Same here, I looked around the page, identified the same things as you. Then gave up trying to figure it out what it actually is and instead thought that maybe the HN conversation might tell me.

Someone below says it's an indie game. Maybe I'll take a look later.

Are you familiar with the Humble Indie Bundle? This is like that. It's an indie game released for pay what you want to support charity.

I'm familiar with the Humble Indie Bundle, so I knew that Voxatron was some kind of game before clicking the link. After the link, I know nothing new. It could be a shooter, a platformer, a puzzle game, or anything else. There should be a brief description of the game in a prominent place on the page.

Honest question: do you really don't know what the humble bundle is, or are you just playing devil's advocate?

Remember, even if you've been exposed to something in the past, it doesn't mean you know what it is. I clicked on the article on the HN page, by reading the title, and didn't see the domain until I went to click on the back button. I can't say that I didn't have any inkling that it was a game, and whether it was from the mine craft like picture or the url I can't say (though I don't know for sure that humble bundle is only games.)

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...

This Humble Bundle is a bit of an abberation; normally the deal is like 5-6 games for pay-what-you-want. So the value proposition is normally a lot better - "dude I can get SIX GAMES for like TWO DOLLARS!" and that tends to be enough to draw you down to click on the games' icons and find out about them.

A valid question in return would be, "Do you know how many people don't know what the Humble Bundle is?"

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.

Right, but we're on HN, and Humble Bundle Inc is a YC company that gets on the front page with some regularity.

I'm sure I'm in a bit of an echo chamber, but it just seems strange to me since it's been so widly discussed here and in other places I frequent (e.g. reddit - another site I don't expect my parents to know but would be surprised if the common HN-er didn't hear about it).

Just my opinion, but I too didn't know what voxatron was until I played the video (which was great, by the way). I know what the Humble Bundle is, but I think what threw me off is that I usually hear it referred to as "the humble indie bundle", and since it contained neither the words indie nor bundle, I assumed it was somebody using intentionally similar phrasing to promote an unrelated product.

I knew what it was, so maybe I'm not the best test subject. And I agree with you that this kind of thing should be above the fold. But it's there if you use your scroll wheel in the first 11 seconds:

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.

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