Tumble Bugs!

 

Tumble Bugs is a game I've designed and developed when I was working for Voxar back in 1997. 

Initially it was supposed to be a demo game showing the potentiality of the proprietary rendering library of the company (Voxar sells mostly medical oriented rendering software). But then, it turned out to be quite addictive as a game. Eventually Voxar decided to sell it instead.

The library itself is a very interesting one (I took a small part in its developement). Already in 1997 it could show very good looking real-time graphics, with no graphic accelerator, just out of the power of normal-for-the-times CPUs. Miracles of voxel based renderings! Makes you think that all the work on them polygons is joke graphical  hardware engineers did not see yet. 

        
We really had a lot of fun in Voxar offices play-testing the thing! And for sure I had a lot of fun having to design and develop it. I'm still grateful to Voxar for assigning me this as a one person project. Working at Voxar has been a delightful, inspiring experience, between other things for the relaxed, jet productive, atmosphere and of course for all the bright, easygoing colleagues. 

As for the game, it is one of my favorite game concept: one against one, turn-thrust-and-fire based commands, N different  fighting characters (that's O(Nē) different typology of fights!). The game concept itself is quite 2D, but the aim was to "show off" 3D capabilities.
The result is a 2D game using a lot of 3D, with the camera, zooming rotating and tilting a lot during the actions.

The game had quite a number of unique, or at least very rare for the time, technical features, like a high field rendered (as the battle field) that moved much and covered really a lot of the screen, and voxel based, very detailed looking animated models of ships, relit in real time.

You can download a publicly available Demo of Tumble-Bugs. I don't think it get sold anymore (it is a 5 years old game!).