SpriteStack Voxel Editor

Hi, think this looks really cool, although I am a little confused what I, a propsective consumer, should be doing. If I want to give this try, should I buy the current version? Is there a separate purchase for the new version? Does the license carry over?

tl;dr what/where should I buy at this current moment

Hi rezoner, this tool (both versions) look so cool!

I saw you ask on twitter a few days ago for explanations from people who may have looked but then didn't buy, and I'd like to offer my own experience if you're interested.

I'm at most a hobby artist+gamedev, so I expect I might download this and play around with it for a few days, then forget that I ever had it for ~months, before playing around with it again someday. Because of that pattern, I don't make a lot of purchases for art's sake, e.g. I have wanted pico8 for a long time, yet never acted to buy it. I end up setting a bit of an unfairly high bar for believing I'll actually get use out of a new cool thing like this.

So then, looking around and seeing a new version is coming soon with a lot of big changes/features, and today's version is $30, my immediate question is "would a license for today's version grant access to the new one?"

With that in mind, I looked around on your twitter, your patreon, your itch.io, and a few of your website pages, and I wasn't able to find an answer. I might have just missed it! But that left me feeling scared that I'll pay $30 today and in 3 weeks or something, there'll be a new cool thing that I can't have. But I know that if I just wait a while, I'll likely be able to get the new thing then. So... it pushes me toward wanting to wait, even despite your reasonable request for help in funding development of the new thing I want, which I want to help with.

I also saw a mention of access to a renderer coming soon, for patrons, but as an outsider I'm not sure what the renderer is with respect to the rest of the project. I looked over the patron levels and wasn't sure if there's a reason to choose one level over another, outside of how much I want to contribute. Not that there needs to be! But I wondered about it, and the uncertainty gave me enough anxiety to kind of put off the whole decision. And now we're here. :)

So, to recap:

- I want to contribute to your patreon to feel like I'm helping

- I want to buy spritestack (especially the new one, but also the current one)

- I'd be willing to pay probably $40-50 today

- I'm scared I might pay, then miss out on some benefit, and it's making me defer the decision

Anyway, good luck!

I remember you made some pretty awesome .io games in this style. Are they still online?

Pico CAD is a full low poly modeling tool in Pico 8. It's very different from an implementation standpoint than SpriteStack, which is voxel editor, rather than a polygon modeler. They are only similar in both being low resolution, resulting in a similar aesthetic.

I have so many questions. The only thing I know about pico8 is it's a VM for very low end hardware, it used a hexidecimal numpad as it's interface, and black and white.

I just ran the download from the website and it's so much more than that. Are there any other resources to learn more about this?

FYI - SpriteStack has a direct support for PicoCAD files (without need to convert them to anything else) - https://twitter.com/rezoner/status/1412759115370307584

Every art has its why. Check out the wonderful work by @MadMaraca [1] as an example of what one can do with voxels. They're truly stunning. I think that the limitations of voxel art are also its expressive power.

Pixel art didn't replace at all painting, nor did it aspire to do that. But it founds its beautiful niche, and there's beauty in that.

[1] https://twitter.com/MadMaraca

On possible reason is that, at least in theory, it's far less computationally intensive to render voxels because the polygon count is very, very low. So the style not only has intrinsic aesthetic value, but will be less demanding on constrained devices like phones and portable game systems like the DS.

I think you might like Death Trash, I’m running to catch a plane so you’ll have to google it!

With a sprite sheet export you could simulate the 3D rendering using CSS animation and background image position [1]. Some front end developers enjoy challenging themselves by using just HTML and CSS (no JS) to create complex interactive experiences.

[1] https://blog.logrocket.com/making-css-animations-using-a-spr...

For action, adventure, racing games, I agree that 3D is almost always better than 2D. Running around in first-person or third-person is way more immersive and gives much more freedom and depth than anything else.

But for strategy games, 2D can still be good. e.g. for card and board games games, even a "3D" game is just 3D graphics over a 2D playing field. Tower defense, factory-building (Factorio). These games have 3D versions but they aren't particularly better than the 2D ones.

It's not really just the nostalgia. It's taking the base from that point in time while applying things that were not computationally possible back in the day. It's a continuation of that style that many simply appreciate and it's not going away anywhere. Sure we can have photorealistic movies but somehow people still appreciate cartoons.

Voxels/SpriteStacking/3dModelling is more of the how, they can all produce great looking 2d renderings.

I imagine the difference is more based around how the creator wants to create. If you are a 2d artist then jumping into 3d modelling can be a step learning curve, but voxel or sprite stacking are generally more forgiving.

Safari is the new IE.

In Firefox, they play, but show "aborted due to network error" but keep playing. (which was interesting)

works on safari 15.0. Might be an issue with the sight being overvisited so the server was being overloaded

These units were a huge inspiration for me - if you dig through various modding forums you will notice that they use a lot of unknown dedicated software and that there are tons of models created outside of the gamedev bubble by extremely talented people that have nothing to do with the industry on a daily basis and because of that they remain pretty much anonymous.

No - spritestacking is not as effective for the most of things but there is something playful about it - it changes the way you think about what you draw which imposes an unique style on your creations.

The aesthetic is intentionally low-fi. They’re rendered using a retro technique called sprite stacking, where you take 2D image slices and stack them vertically in pseudo-3D space. An explanation is here: https://medium.com/@avsnoopy/beginners-guide-to-sprite-stack...

It looks like the examples are rendered very, very small and enlarged for display. Here's the rabbit; it is only 25x23 pixels.

https://spritestack.io/apng/default/889?v=15698873450001

They would look much better if the same model was rendered at a higher 2d resolution.

I am not using spritestacking as a mean to render things since a long time. It's intentionally sharp, low res and non antialiased because that's the style I like in games.

Please check media on my twitter to get a notion of how it really looks like right now https://twitter.com/rezoner/media

The developer responded on the forum:

Q: "Has SpriteStack been abandoned?"

A: "Nope. 2020 was terrible for me in terms of ability to work. SpriteStack has been rewriten from the ground - it's just terribly delayed because I did not expected things to go that way."

You can check his Patreon account for updates on the rewrite

Not working on my iPhone too. Not your end. Video is broken.

Thank you. It's coded from start to end because I am not familiar with any software that do trailers. I first coded it then wrote music (in FLStudio) that is aligned with events in a demo.

I would be interested to see them with a better shader.