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dang
Related. Others?

Vision of the future: Voxatron's high-priced gamble (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11189329 - Feb 2016 (1 comment)

The Humble Voxatron Debut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3178802 - Oct 2011 (39 comments)

Game Preview: Voxatron - voxel-based, destructible environment, 8bit soundtrack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2070025 - Jan 2011 (65 comments)

keyle
The game voxatron is old.

I'm not sure about the fantasy console version though! This might be new?

avaer
Is it a game, a console, or collection of games? Because the main page and FAQ say different things.

It's probably all of the above, but it might make for a stronger pitch if there was a single framing throughout the site.

egypturnash
It started as a game, and grew into a fantasy console.

It's by the same person who created pico-8, if you're familiar with that.

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lynndotpy
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sl3dge78
Let me just correct you on something, Picotron is not a workstation for the Pico-8. Pico-8, Picotron and Voxatron are all different beasts. All three allow you to make programs (mostly games) and play them but you cannot play a pico-8 game on picotron and vice-versa. All three have a feature to allow you to download games directly on the device. And all three allow you to export your games as standalones. Pico-8 is a console, akin to a gameboy, while picotron is more like a computer. You can make games, but programs too. The whole user space is written inside of it.
jperoutek
I remember playing this probably 10-12 years ago with Minecraft's creator Notch donated a bunch of money to their HumbleBundle campaign. It was pretty early alpha back then, and it seems like the main pivot has been to make it more of a platform for user-created games, rather than a game itself. Interesting!
tombert
I bought the Humble Bundle for this in like 2011, and I played it a bit, but I ended up having a lot more fun with the included Pico-8 that came a bit later.

I think primarily I just found it a lot more approachable than anything else.

onemoresoop
I love PICO-8 too. There are so many games, and they’re all free to play, with the source code available to explore. Some PICO-8 games are genuine works of art. I’m always impressed by how creative people become when working within tight constraints. I wish I’d had something like this when I was a kid. I always recommend Pico-8 to like minded folks, sometimes kids.
cptskippy
I think it was 2013, I bought the same Humble Bundle. It's still in Alpha...
luckydata
that website is doing itself no favor. I could read the whole thing and still didn't fully understand what they are selling.
socalgal2
> Voxatron is a fantasy console and collection of games made entirely out of voxels (little colourful cubes, kind of). The Alpha version comes with an arena shooter and action-adventure cartridges as well as powerful design tools to make your own voxelly games.

What part of that is hard to understand?

phist_mcgee
What is a fantasy console? Is this just software? If it's just software, is the fantasy console some kind of meta game or emulator?

It's not clear at all.

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galleywest200
I recommend the Picotron, their newest fantasy software. It is a full fantasy workstation. It has no upper limit on game size and can export native binaries for the big three OSes. You could, in theory, publish a full game with it.

https://www.lexaloffle.com/picotron.php

rtpg
I've been working in Picotron to go through this "program your own Puyo Puyo" book Sega published... it's a very fun environment to work in.

You can boot it up, fullscreen it and totally LARP programming... I guess an amiga with nicer color pallettes?

https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=166998#p strawberry_src is a fun editor to use for all of this

azhenley
Years ago I had hoped Voxatron and voxel-ish games inspired by it would have taken off more. I wonder why it hasn't saturated the indie game scene more.
Razengan
I wonder what came of all the cool voxel engines that were in development by indie devs and teams not long ago..

Maybe that space can be revisited with AI assistance now?

bottlero_cket
I’m a huge fan of lexaloffle. And while I’m more of a 2D guy, I have used voxatron in the past. It’s a great editor, it runs on almost any hardware requirements, and is versatile enough that you can program anything you want with it. Besides lua, you can also program in a no-code paradigm that I found incredibly clever. Your games can be quite lengthy and feature-full, and you build them easily for web.
pull_my_finger
Unfortunately, development is essentially dead afaik. Pico-8, originally just a prototype/development playground for Voxatron, became an instant hit and totally eclipsed Voxatron and now gets all the development hours, now shared with Picotron, which is an even newer product detracting from Voxatron. It's a total shame too, because I'd seen lots of demos of it on volumetric displays[1] which look amazing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCeZpW8b9J8

MrGilbert
I wonder if zep (the creator) ran into technical issues at some point. The voxels are actual voxels in the sense that the painter’s algorithm is used to splat the voxel grid on the screen. Afaik, he mentioned that there was a lot of optimization needed to get the 60 fps out of it.
spacemarine1
One of our earliest Humble Bundles featured Voxatron as did the Humble Mozilla Bundle (where Voxatron was featured as a snippet on the Firefox home page). Will always have a soft spot for Voxatron.

While in Japan last year for Tokyo Game Show, I got to grab lunch with Joseph, the creator. He is an awesome dude.