Monday, September 24, 2012

Space Invader + Voxel Graphics = Voxel Invaders!


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 of 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! My brother Guillaume did a very good job coding the voxel graphic engine which delegates most of the computing on the graphic card allowing surprisingly fast rendering even on small devices.


The game is overall much more mature than the previous one, with more levels and more efforts put into graphics and gameplay. I also spent some nights creating retro sound effects with my good old Roland SH-101 analogic synthesizer and managed to compose 4 original soundtracks with my favorite tracker (OpenMPT). You can hear all of those in the demo video:


From a marketing point of view, we did two versions of the game: a free demo and a full paid version. We didn't put ads in the free version but simply limited the number of levels. Let's hope our users will find the game fun enough to buy the extra 20 levels!

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Alien Skull on Mars

I just spent some time looking at the amazing first full res pictures of mars taken by Curiosity, and I stumbled on this:
Yes, an alien grave with a skull! It's amazing how the human brain can see things it's looking for in random pictures :)