Experimenting with Voxels
Boxels! Voxels rendered as boxes! There is a very popular boxel game in which you mine and craft. We all know it and love it.
So I wanted to make my own! I mostly wanted to learn how the rendering works, so that’s where most of the development of this project went. Not much gameplay at all. So I guess you could call it more of a tech demo than a game, but I’m still immensely happy with it! I learned a great deal and implemented some really cool features:
- Partially optimized (but still naive) mesh generation
- Voxel physics - specialized raycasting & player-voxel collider
- 2d texture array shader
- Transparent texture shader
- Visual block highlighting (built into the shaders)
- Visual block damage progression (built into the shaders)
- Per-vertex lighting w/ natural sunlight propagation and support for additional light sources
- Fluid blocks with propagation
This was my first time writing shaders for Unity, and my first time doing this particular kind of work in shaders. I gained a much deeper level of understanding of the graphics pipeline.
Here’s the GitHub repo: https://github.com/kotae4/VoxelPrototype
And here’s a little showcase of those features:
