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Comment by gavanwoolery | Hacker News Reader

Also, if anyone has any questions, please let me know! I'm trying to gain some visibility for Voxel Quest, so please spread the word if you can. Thanks!

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Well, maybe not so much questions as honest feedback.

As a tech person, I'm amazed at the tech. As somebody whose greatest design skill is a straight line in Gimp, I find the graphics terrific and different from anything I've seen before in a game. However, as an RPG fan, the blurb on the Kickstarter page didn't resonate with me (apologies if you say more in the video, I had the sound off). There isn't anything about worldbuilding/characterization, or what the gameplay is about (considering that "RPG"s range from DCSS to Planescape Torment). You may also want to reveal some character models (even if they are just concept art).

I would definitely suggest stretch goals (for instance, you speak about supporting additional platforms, this could be one).

Oh, and hopefully you're reaching out to the usual suspects like Rock, Paper, Shotgun to get some coverage.

Yeah I did reach out to RPS, no coverage yet but they are typically dormant near the weekends so it could possibly go out next week (they have covered me in the past).

Yeah, to be honest I am really bad at putting together marketing materials and videos. I tend to talk about the stuff I'm comfortable with, which is mostly technobabble. I have gone into further details in one of the updates on the page, and posting a few more now.

Why is it isometric when you are using voxels? I see the lighting is accurate, so why the limitation?

It is a style choice mostly. :) I am fan of old isometric games like Ultima (which was really diametric), and Fallout. Also, simplest to store tilesets when there is no perspective projection - this means they can be rendered once to a larger bitmap for better performance, and that can be scrolled around on its own (versus redrawing thousands of chunks every frame)

Got it. So you couldn't do a view where you could see the horizon or anything due to the performance fixes. The scrolling wouldn't quite work out. It's interesting, I never thought to do it that way. I suppose you could do like spherical deformation postprocessing if you wanted to make this like tiny planets, but then the problem is that the sides wouldn't correctly show perspective. Anyway, it looks great.

You can tilt the view, as shown in the Kickstarter video, with a straight on projection or top down projection - both are difficult to process visually but you can tilt at a higher angle to get a different effect and visibility (might be good if people are crazy enough to try and build a side-scroller with this engine).

This is beautiful stuff. Are you looking for contributors? I'd love to work on this with you.

Agreed, the visuals are just fantastic. Kind of clashes with my memories of the last Voxel game I played, one of these terribad Delta Force games.

Ah Delta Force, Commanche, Novalogic...the birthplace of my interest in voxels. :)

Thanks, yes - once the source goes out, I'm hoping people will do all sorts of crazy stuff with it. I will hire whoever is the best fit as well, within limitations of whatever my budget is. :)

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