Sunday 23 September 2012

Voxel Invaders : space invader + 3d voxels



This week we (noctua software) released our new video game for android phone: voxel invaders.
This is the sequel of our previous game Retrocosmos, and it follows the same principle (making a fun space invader game for touch screen devices).  Only this time we used 3d voxels (the equivalent of pixels in 3d) for all the graphics.

Voxels based games are starting to appear more and more and are particularly interesting for independent developers because it is much easier to generate a voxel model than a traditional 3d model.

Anyway back to the game:  this has been written almost entirely in C using android ndk, with just a few java code for some of the stuffs the ndk does not allow to do easily (like controlling the device vibrator). I wrote the engine from scratch, using opengl es 2 for the rendering, and some interesting C hacks using macro for the enemies behaviour state machines (maybe I'll do an other post on that an other time).  The good thing about that is that if the game is a success it will be quite easy to port it to other platforms like iOS or symbian.

From a marketing point of view, we did two versions of the game: a free demo and a full paid version.  We have little experience of this kind of approach so I might do a follow up an other time about how much money we made from that.

Here is a video of the gameplay: