Hi everyone, it's been a while since the last update and there have been a few changes to VokCel. Given that and the expanded attempts to increase VokCel's social media presence, a reintroduction is necessary. Due to VokCel's scope, it is not possible to showcase everything you can do in it in this blog post, this is just a basic introduction and refresher.
With that out of the way, let the revamped reintroduction begin!
What is VokCel?
VokCel is a blocky-voxel game and content creation system that allows anyone to express themselves using blocky-voxels in any blocky-voxel style. A lot of people only know voxels from games like Minecraft and similar titles that don’t really deviate that much from Minecraft’s aesthetic. Most even look like merely a re-skinned Minecraft and no more, this includes anticipated titles too. With VokCel however, one can create anything voxel-related from basic Minecraft-like content to very complex voxel models.
Segments
To create in VokCel, things are neatly divided into segments. There are 7 segments in total: creating a voxel piece as well as editing it, joining the pieces you’ve created, animating the pieces you’ve joined, adding sound to the animations you’ve created, as well as to anything else you’ve created and finally, putting it all together, however you want, in a fully destructible, modifiable voxel terrain-world. After this, you can also share what you’ve created with people you’d want to collaborate with in a project, or people who you’d want to enjoy your creations. You’d do this via packages. All of it is conveyed at the start screen. Let’s go through each segment in a basic way, one at a time.
Making Pieces.
The first screen is where the atom of everything is created. To create voxel pieces, just draw on the screen and press build, that’s it! Since these are introductory posts, I’ll keep it brief for now. There are many things you can do in this segment as can be glimpsed from the video attached:
This next video showcases a more complex voxel piece, easily made by the intuitive controls in the segment:
Joining Pieces
After creating your pieces, you can join them any way you’d like, with the ability to modify everything in a parented-structure. This means by joining pieces like this, you’d be creating a skeleton that you can animate in any way later on. This short video demonstrates this:
A video that demonstrates the goblin fully assembled, coming to life:
This next video demonstrates just how complicated your models can be (there’s no limit!) when it comes to sticking your pieces together:
Animating
After creating whatever model you’d like to, it is possible to animate it any way you’d like as well. Whether it’s changing rotations, positions or scales, you can create any type of animation you can imagine. This simple video demonstrates that:
Another example of animation, this time, a cute and eager hero running!
A final sample, demonstrating a fluid, posed animation, to the point that you'd forget you're working with blocky-voxels!:
Sounds
Let’s move on to the sound segment. Here, you can add sounds that make sense within the context of a game, hit-sounds, equip-sounds, animation-sounds of various kinds, etc. To start, I’ll demonstrate how to attach a sound to a simple voxel-piece and modify the way it is played.
Basically, a sound of type .wav is attached and can then be repeated a number of times, with modifiable intervals between each time. The starting time of the entire sound can also be offset to a certain extent, that’s it.
Here is an example of adding sounds to a walk-cycle-animation (animations can have multiple sounds attached that would play depending on the context, e.g. walking on grass vs. walking on concrete):
Packages
There’s one more segment to look at before going to the game section, but this segment involves the game section too. It is the “packaging segment”. The best way to think of it is like a bag, where you can put different things inside: voxel-pieces, joined pieces, animations, sounds, game-sessions and so on. Everything is then packed into a file that you can distribute under different modes. This short video demonstrates the process:
The Gaming Section
Having created all your pieces, figures, avatars and so on, it’s now time to put them in a game-setting! Since these are just introductory posts and the project is still in development, I can only show the edit-mode of the game-segment at this point.
To start with, here is a simple video that shows the process of going into a game-world, I’m demonstrating a simple scene I already made:
Having gone into the game under edit mode, I will demonstrate a series of videos. First, a simple video of walking around the world, within the scene:
Next, a simple video of adding items into the scene, modifying their attributes too:
You can also edit the attributes of assets that have already been added into the scene:
It is also possible to add stationary figures into the scene, these can be loaded with different animations. This is useful for adding things like windmills for example, or anything else you’d like. Here, a robotic owl is added into the scene with a main looped animation loaded into it:
You can also add npcs into the world and set their attributes! :
Here, it is demonstrated how the npc can simulate simple steering behaviours, motion-trails are also visible:
Within the game, it’s also possible to view an extensive map that can be expanded to show traversable areas. Here is a video of it in action:
The terrain can also be modified in various ways. One way is to simply create a terrain tool (a sort of brush) and attach it to any piece or figure you created. After that, load it into the world and modify it as you wish as shown in the video! :
Furthermore, you can also modify the terrain by adding blocks that are smoothly coloured in a way that the terrain is naturally coloured too:
On the terrain, you’d be able to decide the size of each chunk, as well as the render-distance too. You’ll also be able to decide how they’re populated by default before going into the game, e.g. by selecting what models you’d want to act as trees, stones, clouds, etc. This will be demonstrated at a later time.
That’s it for this reintroduction, I hope it gives a proper idea of what VokCel is as development continues!
Gust.
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