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Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

In the featured art, I don't see the why of the voxel sprites compared to the beautiful 3D rendering.

I probably love my old classic games more than average. (Still have Prince of Persia 1989 installed.) And love some new indie game with old graphics. (FTL is awesome if you haven't tried it yet.) But 3D and proper physics enable so much more. It feels odd that so much time is spend on recreating old game feeling for some nostalgia sake compared to let's say exploring new 3D physics engine. (Teardown is an indie awesome game if you want to play with an adventurous physics engine in 3D.)

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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

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.

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 am sorry to be that guy but your assumptions are wrong. Rendering voxels is much more expensive than rendering regular meshes. The polygon count is actually tremendous. Getting detailed models with voxels requires a lot more data than polygon based mesh.

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...

Very few game designers target the web, though.

I was responding to:

> I don't see the why of the voxel sprites compared to the beautiful 3D rendering.

Also, the project homepage says, "SpriteStack is a voxel editor suited for 2D artists"

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.

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

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