''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 Pennsylvania, United States * Independentes (English: Independents), a Portuguese artist ...

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 ...

video game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

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 begi ...

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

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

and game prototype available for download. The core

voxel In computing, a voxel is a representation of a value on a three-dimensional regular grid, akin to the two-dimensional pixel. Voxels are frequently used in the Data visualization, visualization and analysis of medical imaging, medical and scient ...

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 ge ...

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. Des ...

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

Pre-alpha The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

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 ...

. On 12 November 2013 the game was also successfully

Steam Greenlight Steam is a digital distribution service and storefront developed by Valve. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 to provide video game updates automatically for Valve's games and expanded to distributing third-party titles in l ...

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 Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

under the

GPLv3 The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

Cross-platform Within 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 platform, computing platforms. Some ...

support via

CMake CMake is a free, cross-platform, software development tool for building applications via compiler-independent instructions. It also can automate testing, packaging and installation. It runs on a variety of platforms and supports many program ...

for

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

and

MacOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

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

Fate

As of April 2023, 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 is recorded on a blockchain and is used to certify ownership and authenticity. It cannot be copied, substituted, or subdivided. The ownership of an NFT is recorded in the blockchai ...

-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 (service), Steam software distribution service owned by Valve Corporation, Valve to estimate the ...

References

External links

Official Vox Website
(archived)
Vox
source code on

(archived)
Vox
on

Vox development videos
on

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

{{Use Canadian English, date=April 2025 Role-playing video games Adventure games Indie games Video games with voxel graphics Windows games 2012 video games Open-source video games Linux games MacOS games Video games developed in Canada Multiplayer and single-player video games