''Vox'' is an

independent Independent or Independents may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Artist groups * Independents (artist group), a group of modernist painters based in the New Hope, Pennsylvania, area of the United States during the early 1930s * Independ ...

voxel-based

adventure An adventure is an exciting experience or undertaking that is typically bold, sometimes risky. Adventures may be activities with danger such as traveling, exploring, skydiving, mountain climbing, scuba diving, river rafting, or other extreme spo ...

and

role-playing Role-playing or roleplaying is the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. While the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' offers a definition of role-playing a ...

video game Video games, also known as computer games, are electronic games that involves interaction with a user interface or input device such as a joystick, controller, keyboard, or motion sensing device to generate visual feedback. This fee ...

developed by Canadian studio AlwaysGeeky Games. __TOC__

Gameplay

''Vox'' is an adventure and creation game created using a voxel and block based aesthetic. ''Vox'' focuses on player created content, and allows the player to customize every aspect of the game. Players can create their own custom characters, weapons, items, monsters, NPCs and everything else in the game. Since everything in the game is made up of voxels, everything can be edited and customized using the same interface. The editors and tools that allow for creation of voxel objects and sprites are part of the game and built into the gameplay of the game. This allows ''Vox'' to further enhance the gameplay of other voxel based games, that only allow modification to the voxel world. ''Vox'' features a dynamic world that is populated with many interactive elements, such as monsters and NPC villages and would have had a full story and adventure mode. This mode would have also featured a dynamic quest system.

History

Development

Originally, ''Vox'' started as an entry into the

Ludum Dare Ludum Dare (LD; , meaning 'to give a game', also referenced as LDJAM) is a game jam competition. It was founded by Geoff Howland and was first held in April 2002. It is currently run by Mike Kasprzak, who has been part of the team since the beg ...

#23 competition, named "When Worlds Collide", with the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the wo ...

and game prototype available for download. The core

voxel In 3D computer graphics, a voxel represents a value on a regular grid in three-dimensional space. As with pixels in a 2D bitmap, voxels themselves do not typically have their position (i.e. coordinates) explicitly encoded with their values. Ins ...

engine An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy. Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power gen ...

technology was created over the course of the two day

Weekend. Later the development was documented openly on a website titled "Let's make a voxel engine". Vox was developed using an incremental release model and as new features and elements are added to the game, these are gradually released in updates. The latest available public demo version distributed via

IndieDB Mod DB is a website that focuses on general video game modding. It was founded in 2002 by Scott "INtense!" Reismanis. As of September 2015, the Mod DB site has received over 604 million views, has more than 12,500 modifications registered, and ...

is v0.28.

Releases

Vox was first commercially released on digital distributor

Desura Desura was a digital distribution platform for the Microsoft Windows, Linux and OS X platforms. The service distributed games and related media online, with a primary focus on small independent game developers rather than larger companies. Desur ...

on 8 September 2012Vox
on desura (archived) as playable

Pre-alpha A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

release version. In Jun 2013 the game was released via

Humble Store Humble Bundle, Inc. is a digital storefront for video games, which grew out of its original offering of Humble Bundles, collections of games sold at a price determined by the purchaser and with a portion of the price going towards charity and t ...

. On 12 November 2013 the game was also successfully

Steam Greenlight Steam is a video game digital distribution service and storefront by Valve. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 as a way for Valve to provide automatic updates for their games, and expanded to distributing and offering third ...

ed as "Early access" game.

Open-source

Around end of 2015 the

of Vox was made available as

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

under the

GPLv3 The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general us ...

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

Cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software r ...

support via

CMake In software development, CMake is cross-platform free and open-source software for build automation, testing, packaging and installation of software by using a compiler-independent method. CMake is not a build system itself; it generates anothe ...

for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

and

MacOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

was added. There was development activity on the repository until 2017 by AlwaysGeeky Games. The repository has since been taken down.

Fate

As of September 2022, the game has not received an update since 2017. While it is still listed as early access, it is no longer available for purchase on Steam. AlwaysGeeky Games has moved on to create Voxie Tactics, a similar,

NFT A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided, that is recorded in a blockchain, and that is used to certify authenticity and ownership. The ownership of an NFT is recorded in the ...

-based game.

Reception

As of November 2018, the game has received mostly negative reviews from Steam users. In January 2017

Steam Spy Steam Spy is a website created by Sergey Galyonkin and launched in April 2015. The site uses an application programming interface (API) to the Steam software distribution service owned by Valve to estimate the number of sales of software titles o ...

guessed, based on available data, around 20,000 owners.Vox
on

steamspy Steam Spy is a website created by Sergey Galyonkin and launched in April 2015. The site uses an application programming interface (API) to the Steam software distribution service owned by Valve to estimate the number of sales of software titles o ...

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official Vox Website
(archived)
Vox
source code on

(archived)
Vox
on

Vox development videos
on

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

Role-playing video games Adventure games Indie video games Video games with voxel graphics Windows games 2012 video games Ludum Dare video games Open-source video games Linux games MacOS games Video games developed in Canada Multiplayer and single-player video games