Voxile, the co-op, ray traced, micro-voxel, survival-crafting game from VoxRay Games, has just released its largest update yet: THE BUILDER’S UPDATE (release notes here). You can check out the Steam demo here and Voxile is now 40% off on Steam until March 9th.
Keep up with all the latest updates in VoxRay Games Discord Channel.
The Founder
I first met Wouter von Oortmersen for lunch in downtown San Francisco in July of 2023. Friends had put his studio on my radar (shout out to Dan Levine and Jeffrey Rosen) so when we connected on LinkedIn, I was excited to arrange an in-person meeting.
I expected to spend the afternoon chatting casually about high-level gamedev and design. I had seen video of Voxile’s high-fidelity, ray traced, global illumination with reflections. So my plan was to ask for a Steam key and then boot it up on my gaming rig when I got home. Instead, Wouter brandished a slender laptop from his backpack (with no wall power outlets in sight) and in seconds, the Voxile demo loaded up and was sustaining high frame rates without jitter in all its high-definition glory.
I climbed up from the tranquil beach to forage in the forest but was violently interrupted by an angry skeleton. After losing substantial health, I smashed him into pieces. As I caught my breath… I realized that the sun was arcing through the sky while all the shadows (even the shadows on the little voxel blades of voxel grass) were dynamically updating in real-time. Soon the sun had set and now the glow of flickering torchlight and phosphorescent mushrooms made the engine even more beautiful.
“Is this Unity or Unreal?” I asked even though I knew I had never seen anything like it before.
“Neither,” Wouter replied. “VoxRay Games uses our own custom engine written in our own custom programming language, Lobster.”
The Why
Wouter’s accomplished career had driven him to this moment (just check out his github). There are very few game developers who have the talent, intelligence and fortitude to tackle game development at both the engine and language level. Let’s be clear, before Jai was a twinkle in Jon Blow’s eye: Wouter had invented and helped design nine languages: Amiga E, FALSE, Bla (created during his Masters in Computer Science), Aardappel (invented during his PHD research), WadC, SHEEP, CubesScript, CryScript and Restructor.
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