Week 55: More Voxel Tech

This week was OK!

Most of the week went into the first-person voxel thing again! There was a bit of a break-through which was nice and gameplay is really the one thing missing now. I also started making a tiny game to loosen up a bit!

There was one Pico-8 Doodle this week! It’s a mix between an earlier doodle and another earlier doodle!

Fun fact: the pixel fading effect used on this doodle was the subject of this week’s Snippet Decrypt which is a Patreon-exclusive weekly series which you may be interested in maybe? Plus, you’d be supporting me directly and that’d be an awesome way to show that you appreciate the stuff I make! 😀

The voxel thing is going well! At the beginning of the week, I tried to make animated voxel tiles and it worked very nicely without any big problems and more importantly, with barely any drop in the CPU.

Then I tried to add voxels in my little voxel world at runtime. That didn’t go quite as smoothly.

The voxel world is optimised so that instead of taking 16 times the Pico-8 memory, it only takes a tenth of the Pico-8 memory. It works great with static voxels and even with the animated tiles but adding dynamic voxels on the go isn’t quite as easy. In the end I managed a way to do it with a limited impact on the CPU but only after 2 days on the problem.

The bad news is that this can be done only with one item at a time or the CPU gets really tired. The good news is that I can add voxel animation and that should be enough to make something cool!

So now, the main thing missing is gameplay. I’ve been collecting ideas and thought a bit about retro-games that could be done in my little voxel engine, like Pac-Man, Tron or Snake, but I’m still undecided on what game I want to make. I did realize that fleeing stuff is not the right way to go, as you can’t quickly look behing you, so I’ll be leaning towards following things instead.

This next week should be the last one on this project. The gameplay will be the main concern until it’s done and then I will write a Super Doodle Insights all about the project and the different optimizations that went into it! Both the game and the article should get released at the same time sometime during the week.

 

Meanwhile, I’ve started another project! The voxel project is super technical and can get pretty heavy at times, so I decided to start something much simpler on the side!

Flying Pop-Pop is gonna be a very simple arena shooter, nothing too fancy, just the fun stuff. It has a one page design document and it is basically a gamejam sort of game. I’m looking forward to working some more on this and finishing it either this week or the one after that!

 

And that’s it for this week! I think it went OK. It’s good to see the voxel project coming to its last phase!

Next week I’m finishing the voxel project, writing the article about it and working some more on Flying Pop-Pop! There might be Pico-8 Doodles!

Have a great week!

Take care!

TRASEVOL_DOG