
The Humble Voxatron Debut - simonista
http://www.humblebundle.com/#voxatron
======
robinhouston
In a selfish sort of way, I hope this discussion doesn’t end up being
completely dominated by the question of whether the “Humble Bundle” offers are
going downhill or whether their web page is well enough designed.

I’d like to see Voxatron succeed, not only because it’s the most interesting
indie game I’ve played for a long time, but also because I’ve admired
Lexaloffle for years, since I became dangerously obsessed with his beautiful
game Zen Puzzle Garden, and I like to think that quiet inventiveness and
careful dedication deserve the occasional reward.

I heard on Saturday that a paper I wrote with Lexaloffle’s Joseph White (and
Martyn Amos) has been accepted for publication. We prove that Zen Puzzle
Garden is NP-complete. It’s based on a post I made years ago to the old ZPG
BBS. Joseph immediately understood the proof, and suggested a significant
improvement.

<http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ipl.2011.10.016>
<http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.2104v1>

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mdanger
I remember there being some discussion around the Humble Bundle brand getting
"diluted" by the Frozenbyte bundle last time, and I have to wonder if that's
becoming the case.

~~~
elliottcarlson
Agreed - at this point it's nothing more than a every so often flash sale with
a name your own price system. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing - but I
have far less interest in donating larger amounts "to support the community"
when it's becoming a deal site - instead I am starting to get the mentality to
get everything at the greatest deal I possibly can.

~~~
rprospero
Your post made me realize something. Just like you, I'd previously been
generous in my payment to "support the community". When I loaded up the page
today and saw the offering, I mentally said "I don't have $20 to blow on this
right now" and left the site. Until I read your post, I never even considered
that I could just pay less than $20.

Even odder, once I finish writing this, I'm still not heading over there to
buy the bundle, even though I could only spend $0.01.

~~~
palish
On the other hand, I have $200 left to my name total, and I'm happily spending
$1.00.

If $0.01 is all you can afford, there's no shame in it.

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watmough
Voxatron.

    
    
      Frantic-ish action.
      Plays like Robotron. (hold down fire key to strafe)
      Voxel effects are awesome.
      Great sound, much less harsh than Robotron.
      Lots of power-ups.
      Very fun game.
    

I happily paid $10, as it's supporting both charities ($1.5 each) and the
developer ($5.50).

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robinhouston
The developer’s blog post <http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=260> has some
more details about the game and the planned development process.

Here are two bits I found especially interesting:

“In general, I don't think it's a good idea to keep a project in a constantly
presentable/releasable state. For technical reasons, it encourages short term
hacks and a reluctance to take things apart and design them cleanly. And
especially from a creative position, once something is observed by other
people it often seems to freeze into an unmoveable state, in the expectations
of players and the mind of the designer.”

“Voxatron is based on a virtual 128x128x64 display. It's a buffer of 3d video
memory that is rendered out to the screen at the end of each frame, much as an
old-school 2d display is. You can POKE bytes into the virtual memory, and they
come out as voxels. I don't compromise on this — even the menus are drawn into
the voxel display. Hopefully one day I can get hold of a real physical
128x128x64 display and play Voxatron on it with almost no modification.”

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simonista
Sorry for the hash tag in the url, it's not necessary but I figured we wanted
a separate thread to discuss the new bundle. A mod can strip it off if
desired.

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sudonim
Best quote from the humble bundle video: "Facebook share it, tweet it, Do
whatever the verb of google plus-ing is."

What is the verb for google plus? +1-ing?

~~~
Raphael
+1 is the action of approval (past tense: +1'd), however it's not very useful,
as Humble Bundle re-uses their root URL for the page, so I had already done
this.

When write on Google+, the submit button is labelled "Share".

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extension
For those wondering what this game is all about, this is the interesting part:

 _"Voxatron is based on a virtual 128x128x64 display. It's a buffer of 3d
video memory that is rendered out to the screen at the end of each frame, much
as an old-school 2d display is. You can POKE bytes into the virtual memory,
and they come out as voxels. I don't compromise on this -- even the menus are
drawn into the voxel display. Hopefully one day I can get hold of a real
physical 128x128x64 display and play Voxatron on it with almost no
modification."_

The game is a top-down shooter in the vein of Robotron, but with 3D
environments. It features volumetric equivalents to many basic 2D graphics
operations: a scrolling background, sprites, animations, particle systems,
physics, etc.

Everything is destructable too. If you shoot enough holes in an object, it
will collapse in a heap of voxels.

It even includes a level editor.

The game looks fantastic and I've never heard of anything like it. If you are
even remotely interested in games or realtime graphics, you need to see this.

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joshu
I adore indie games.

Someone should build an iTunes for indie games, or something.

~~~
jarin
Like Steam or Desura?

Or uh, iTunes Store?

~~~
joshu
> The Desura client currently only works on Windows and Linux PCs. We are
> working on support for Mac. To be notified when support is added, please
> provide your email:

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n9com
How is one game a 'bundle'?

~~~
mminer
You no longer have to be scratching your head about this one, they just added
two games to the bundle. Misnomer no more.

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mminer
The game is decently fun, but it was the art that sold me. The voxel style
looks like one of those themes that developers rocking a low budget can pull
off beautifully.

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egypturnash
five bucks, ker-bought! I've been following the teaser videos for a while and
am excited to have a chance to fool around in it.

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51Cards
"...do whatever the verb of Google plus-ing is" The laugh from that line alone
was worth my purchase price.

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antoinehersen
Such an interesting social experiment. I am going to indulge my inner
economist.

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joshu
Bought it.

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nirvana
I wish you the best, whatever it is you are, so constructive feedback follows:

Voxatron is too humble. I just went to the page. I had my browser window
pretty big... taking up most of a 21" monitor.

Here's what I could tell about Voxatron:

1\. It's called voxatron

2\. It's "pay what you want".

3\. It supports charity

4\. It is DRM free

5\. The people behind voxatron thought a sorta mincraftish image would
communicate something significant to me.

6\. It seems like it can run on a Mac.

I think these are all, clearly, features you wanted to communicate, and you
succeeded in doing so very well.

However, I then hit my back button because, in the time it took me to grasp on
that, I realized I had no clue what Voxatron was.... and I have spent too much
time trying to figure things like that out in the past on other sites such
that I've gotten the impression that if I don't get it right away, I likely
never will. (Seriously, I can't tell you how many times I've followed links
from google, gotten to a corporate site, spent 5-10 minutes there, unable to
make heads or tails-- when I got there because, according to the query I
crafted for google, google thinks this company is selling what I wanted to buy
RIGHT THEN. The barrier is much lower for links on HN.)

Is it a game? Is it a voice transcoder? Is it an auto tuner? Is it for
musicians? Is it for kids playing around with digital signal processing?

Give me a one line description of what voxatron is or does, without too much
hyperbole, and put it front and center, maybe right under or replacing the
word "voxatron" where it is now on the page. And if there IS Such a line, and
I completely missed it, then I think your page layout is too busy and it
caused me to overlook it.

You got my 11 seconds, but didn't get me very far down the funnel to
conversion.

Again, with all respect, and hopes that this is helpful-

~~~
ido
Honest question: do you really don't know what the humble bundle is, or are
you just playing devil's advocate?

~~~
MrFoof
A valid question in return would be, "Do you know how many people don't know
what the Humble Bundle is?"

Moreover, what percentage of the population is even aware that A) you can buy
games to play on the computer, and B) that didn't come from a big box
retailer? I'll tell you this -- it's very much in the minority, _especially_
when you look at the 30-and-up crowd. Much older than that and the percentage
of the population starts to approach zero.

I grew up with an Atari VCS 2600 (that my parents had bought for themselves),
as did most others I know. However if I asked my parents -- or those of anyone
I know -- what Steam was, they wouldn't think of anything other than water
vapor. Humble Bundle? Not a chance.

I've heard of kids on the bus and subway recently, talking about "this new
Steam thing". If kids aren't aware of it, how aware is the general population
of something far more obscure? Not very.

~~~
ido
Right, but we're on HN, and Humble Bundle Inc is a YC company that gets on the
front page with some regularity.

I'm sure I'm in a bit of an echo chamber, but it just seems strange to me
since it's been so widly discussed here and in other places I frequent (e.g.
reddit - another site I don't expect my parents to know but would be surprised
if the common HN-er didn't hear about it).

~~~
morrow
Just my opinion, but I too didn't know what voxatron was until I played the
video (which was great, by the way). I know what the Humble Bundle is, but I
think what threw me off is that I usually hear it referred to as "the humble
indie bundle", and since it contained neither the words indie nor bundle, I
assumed it was somebody using intentionally similar phrasing to promote an
unrelated product.

