Voxel Quest
Produced by: Gavan Woolery
Website: Voxel Quest
Forum: Forums – Voxel Quest
The first engine iteration for Voxel Quest, which features isometric voxel rendering.
Voxel Quest was successfully Kickstarter in November of 2014. Billed as a “Role Playing Simulation With Emergent AI”, it is being built primarily as an open-ended world simulation game. According to the game’s About page, the project also entails the development of an open source (though currently licensed) engine that attempts to tackle many problems — one in particular — that previous games have been unable to overcome:
The primary problem that I am addressing is the so-called “Holy Grail” of game design – creating a living, interactive world that functions as you would expect, without events pre-scripted by a human. This means that every action you take has a real, sensible, and permanent consequence. NPCs in the world respond to your actions appropriately, but more importantly, they have their own goals and run their own lives regardless of your existence (rather than, say, sitting around waiting to give you a quest). This might sound like a pipe-dream, but I am attempting to address it on a fairly crude level initially, and rather than blindly entering this field, I actually have a long history of working with AI and I know what is and is not possible.
Unfortunately, time and money ran out for Mr. Woolery before he could fully realize this vision, and Voxel Quest has more or less been cancelled as of mid-2016. Which is not to say that it has been wholly abandoned; it’s just that development on it, if it proceeds at all, will proceed much more slowly, and only when the developer has the opportunity to tinker with it.
There is some good news, however: Mr. Woolery is in the process of releasing the different iterations of the Voxel Quest engine via GitHub.
