r/VoxelGameDev

Imagine a game that is technically built entirely with voxels, but where the voxels are so small (or the world resolution is so high) that the traditional blocky look, like Minecraft, is almost invisible.

Would it bother you if such a game were described as a “voxel game” ?

On one hand, it would be completely accurate from a technical standpoint. On the other hand, the word “voxel” is now so strongly associated with a specific visual style that it could create false expectations for players.

So I’m curious to hear what you think : does the word “voxel” primarily describe a technology, or has it become a visual style in itself ?

For a concrete example : all three images come from my Unity sandbox. The clouds themselves are made of voxels roughly 20 meters wide, contained inside volumes about 4 km across, with a view distance of around 30 km in these screenshots.

At that scale, you can barely perceive the individual voxels anymore but technically, everything is still voxel-based.

Custom voxel renderer I’m building inside Godot. No meshes.

full blog post here: https://phantum.de/2026/05/18/voxelzeug-xviii-voxel-based-depth-of-field-pt-1

In my renderer Voxelzeug that I am developing the smallest, indivisible element is a voxel: A voxel (like a pixel) can only have a single color and must always have sharp outlines.

How do Lighting, Reflections and camera blur (depth of field) among other things work with these constraints - with Voxelzeug I am exploring these questions?

The above shows my first attempt (which I a currently changing) for voxel based depth-of-field. The geometry is modelled as an OC-Tree: Starting with a single cube that engulfs the whole scene and with 8 child-cubes of half its size (side length). Each of those 8 child-cubes has themselves 8 children, all the way down to eventually a voxel.

During raytracing per individual ray the tree might not get fully resolved, based on its distance to camera.

Tried MagicaVoxel before, but the lack of depth control is just too much to couple with my lack of artistic skills. Only if I have a stylus that works in 3D... which I do!

Finally got the most basic thing to call it an "editor" done today (add/remove voxels, and move the model around). Implemented with Bevy/ Bevy Mod XR, with custom voxel rendering algorithm (Large cube meshs that renders the SVO inside). The algorithm is designed to do third person view, and I had to insert extra triangles when the cube intersects the near plane, to prevent the whole chunk from getting clipped (the camera for recording still have some bugs on this).

While it is still crude, the handling does feel quite nice and intuitive.

Make games, not game engines, nor the dozens of tools that might be used for the game that has zero progress.

I posted this twice earlier (months ago), but mods keep removing it for reasons. Cause i need to proof more i made it myself based on the content? (i don't get it).

So, here is the source:

https://perh.app/b89c006f/trials/00002-voxel-game-publish/index.html

Code is 99.99% free of AI bullshit (maybe some old shard). Its three.js + rapier.js.

Press tab+m and then release tab to put it in manual mode. Game pad support is also enabled (i think). Change config.js to change voxels of the car.

Let me know if it works/fails etc. And ask me anything!

Hey everyone!

The engine is really coming together and the scenes are starting to feel much more alive. Here is a look at the coastal/ocean biome generation in VoxelForge.

Current features shown in the video:

• Coastal Topography: Smooth island transitions, shallow sandbanks, and deep seabed generation.
• Procedural Palm Trees: Curved trunks, coconut clusters, and cascading fronds.
• Foliage Wind Animation: Vertex shader displacement applied to flowers and palm canopies for organic breeze movement.
• Water & Lighting: Water transparency with reflections and a warm summer lighting profile.
• Skybox & High Clouds: Volumetric layered voxel clouds with horizon-aware rendering.

Still actively optimizing batching and draw calls, but really happy with how the atmosphere is turning out.

Feedback and thoughts are always welcome!

Hello Guys, I'm a game developer but i have never worked on voxels before, i came across a game on Google Play Store Voxel Shooter, can anyone please guide me how they have created such objects ?

https://cenullum.com/mine_mage_minion/raylib_bevy/

Changed the previous fbm noise into worley noise.
Next gonna work on the biome blending :p

This week I spent a great deal of time working to port the model into discrete voxels. I wanted the ability to generate variation in foliage without the manual authorship of thousands of trees of the same type, so I built a system to generate the variations based on random rotations and templates. Here are a few images showing the progression of the foliage. The first is the final result, the second image is the underlying collision mask, the third image is the mesh as shown in my editor I built, and the last is the skeleton of the tree.

There are a few cool features of this system, the first is that trees can be destroyed at a per-branch level. The second is that the destruction of the tree cascades through the voxels, so chopping the tree at the trunk destroys the whole tree. I'm really happy with this result, and although I need to work on the mesh geometry for the trees to work better with my style, I'm very pleased with the progress.

This is the last tree post for a bit - I promise, I don't want to overwhelm the sub with tree posts 👀

I am working on a voxel game engine & editor with the purpose of fast iteration and hand-free voxel drawing for those, like me, not willing to do 3d modeling, and making it fast even on older GPUs. So here is a demo I wanted to show you.

There are now too many technical details to cover. I'll probably write a full article later, but in the meantime, here's a brief overview.

The terrain is an editable SVDAG (Sparse 64-tree with only de-duplication at the last layer of the tree). The voxel editing works a little like what is described in the HashDAG paper:

Starting from the root node of the 64-tree, I evaluate a coverage test between any input shape and the AABB of the node
- If fully covered, the node becomes a voxel leaf
- If partially covered, recurse into children and repeat
- otherwise, stop

and a regular hash table is used to prevent the duplication of 4x4x4 groups of voxels at the end of the tree.

The whole tree is uploaded to the GPU at once for each edit (bad idea but it has not become a liability yet).

Everything is raymarched and path traced in a single compute shader: First, the SVDAG terrain, then the entities, for which I first test the intersection with their AABB then apply the transform (scale,rotation,position) by simply multiplying the inverse transform matrix with the ray direction & origin when I raycast them.

Entities can be anything raycastable that comes with a transform matrix and a AABB, like an SDF, or a raw voxel grid with directional distance field stored in empty voxels.

The pinball physics are just hard coded for the purpose of testing the engine so nothing new or fancy.

Eleven arenas from the creature collection RPG I am building on my own. Two seconds each, one continuous orbit, cut at matching points in the movement so it reads as a single take.

I am curious whether the cuts hold up for anyone else or whether you can all see the seams.