Voxelcraft is now complete

I've set up the control system and the save/loading, so Voxelcraft is good to go as of today :)

It's about time, too.

I came up with an idea of some video game I wanted to make a long while ago, but I was still trying to figure out the big things like, how am I going to make the worlds? Collision? How will it be played? I had put together a scene that would depict what the game would look like:

I wanted to make an RPG in the style of an 8-bit era game, sort of like Half Minute Hero and the Bit.Trip series. It's bit of a step up from the last game I made, which was a mindless shoot-em-up where you shot down tons of Michael Jacksons using your Rubber Ducks. For that game, I developed a basic shooter engine and built levels as I wanted, but now I'm going to have to plan. RPGs focus on chains events where doing one thing in one place will let you do another thing in another place. Not completely sure how I'll do this, but I'll figure it out along the way.


I don't remember when I decided to use "3D" for my game. It felt more natural for an 8-bit game to be in 2D. Maybe I thought it'd be a nice experiment. I tried figuring out what type of 3D would be best for my game, and how complex it would be. I didn't feel like using a 3D modeling system like Blender or 3Ds Max. I wanted all geometry to be calculated in-game during loads. In the end, I decided to use cubes and only cubes for the worlds I make.

I think it's been about six months ago when I started working on Voxelcraft. And once I was able to place the first cubes, it looked something like this:

You might see a problem in this picture where there are these lines across corners. I was whining so much about this, and I tried to find out how to fix this. Eventually I found out what my problem was!

I'm stupid.

I can't have a cube with 8 vertices that share normals for lighting values. If I wanted each face to be lighted correctly, they'd need their own vertices. So now cubes have 24 vertices.

For the rest of the development of the program, it went slowly. I was learning how XNA works, and was doing other things at the time (such as schooling. Damn you school).

But I'm glad I finally have this program done. This means I can finally move on to other programs! I have so many more I have to make, but none of them will be as hard to make as Voxelcraft was. Voxelcraft is about as far as graphics for my game goes, except for particles and sprites.

Which is the next program I'll be developing. Dust. It will make all the particle animations for battles. It'll be very similar to my previous Particle program I built in Visual Basic, Pixelcraft...

I want my game to not only run on PC and XBox, but also on the new Windows Phone, with shadows and some other effects turned off (XNA on Windows Phone can't have custom shaders). Particles usually have custom shaders, but they can be drawn with XNA's built-in BasicEffect, so particles will be simple.

Another program I'm looking forward to making is one that will create "cinematic" attacks. For many games where your character has some special attack, it stops playing like a game and looks like an interactive movie for a minute. Squaresoft is rather fond of this, but don't worry, I won't make attacks sequences that drag out over a minute :-P I'm thinking that instead of having the player watch some movie, I'll have them interact with the attacks to change the outcome of it (this way, I can have bosses that have attacks that kill everyone in one hit, but can be avoided and possibly countered) I'm thinking about how the player will interact. Will it be through button presses?... as with EVERY game!?

It'll be figured out soon.