@Cliqist noticed that Voxel Quest has released all source versions to backers. Read the most recent update here.

In August, their requests were partially answered. An early version of the Voxel Quest engine was added to github for backers to download. The idea being to get the source code out to those who had supported the game. Now with the most recent update, Woolery has released every version of Voxel Quest under a zlib license. This will allow the community to continue to mod and update the code as they see fit.

Making The Best Of The Situation

It's a good faith gesture on Woolery's part. He is now working full-time and thus unable to dedicate himself to the completion of the project. Refunds are still available to anyone who requests them. Not everyone will be able to do much with these early builds.

It's certainly not an ideal end to such a promising campaign. Still, more developers who find themselves handling a failing project should take note. Voxel Quest proves that there is a way to bow out of a project without burning the community who helped you start it.

Another development with Voxel Quest. The game is going fully open source. There's no timetable as to when this will occur.

Another Update

6/14/2016

Hi all - bet you are wondering what is going on at this point. The short answer is I did not know exactly how to proceed until now, finally having an idea of my employment situation.

I have talked to some people (in the forums, email, and elsewhere) about the current status but otherwise apologize for the silence. Basically for the past month I have been busy hunting for jobs and doing associated prep work or tasks. I also tried to get VQ funded via other means (licensing) but that did not work out. I am moving on to a fulltime job, so I am deciding to cancel the Patreon (and I will refund everyone's money here and elsewhere, of course). I don't feel right taking money when I probably won't have much time or energy to devote to the project.

The good news is that I am making all of Voxel Quest fully open source (MIT or similar, every iteration of the engine will be available), and I am doing a little bit of work to make things ready for this (I am even attempting to buy rights to the sprite sheet that Voxel Quest uses, which is a 3rd party asset). Stay tuned for more on this. I can't express how thankful I am that you chose to support me, and I hope that the years of work I put into VQ and all its source will be a small token of my gratitude. I will probably cancel my Patreon before the next pledge cycle so you don't need to necessarily manage your pledge, it should be automatically canceled soon. The Patreon peaked at $450/month, which I am really surprised at, although I expressed concern with starting it in the first place and turns out those concerns were valid. I will also soon organize a method for refunds (both for Patreon and everything else). Any questions or concerns, as usual, do not hesitate to contact me. Again, my goal is to keep everyone happy so let me know what I can do in that respect.

I am not fully abandoning VQ - I will attempt to provide as much support as I reasonably can to help people understand the source, and I will also probably chip in on the github repository every so often. But overall I will not be making great strides in the short term. I am hoping that someone can eventually make a commercial product with it, and that might kick up interest a bit.

For those curious, I am soon going to start contracting at OpenAI, with potential to move full time.

*Again, I stress that refunds are not required, but if anyone wants one I am offering without judgement.
​
Additionally, I have read through all of the comments below and I continue to be blown away by people's enthusiasm. I am not replying individually because my website's comment handler is a pain to use for many entries.

The dev of Voxel Quest is out of money right now, but tries to continue the project somehow:

What does the future hold?

No point in dancing around the issue, I am out of money and trying to figure out what the next step is. Whatever happens, I am continuing to work on VQ, as that does not cost me anything but time. But I might need to allocate much of that time to a paying job, unless I can figure something else out.

The one thing that I have decided, for certain, is that I am returning everyone's money: Kickstarter backers, investors, patrons, and preorders (and anything else). Everyone will keep their rewards regardless. I made this decision before I even launched my Kickstarter campaign, although I've only talked about it with a few people.  I am taking this step regardless of success or failure.

If I have to work another job, I will probably begin this return process as soon as possible (and it will take time to accumulate everything).  Otherwise I will begin returning money when profitable.  I am still planning to release something in the short term, as well as the source code.

I can understand if anybody is disappointed or angry, but I assure you no one has a heavier heart than I do. I invested over $100k of my own money, debt, and equity into this, in addition to about $500k of work (accounting for overtime and opportunity cost).  I spent about a decade working in this area without any sort of return (other than it being "fun"), and over the past 3 years I put in well over 10,000 hours. I dragged my family through all of this as well. Nonetheless, if there is anything more I can do, please let me know.

This is not the end, but it is still a depressing position to be in. Still, I can't help but be grateful to have been given an opportunity to work full time on something like this.

As I have mentioned in the past, writing a game engine is a feasible (if unwise) thing to do, if you pick your battles carefully. I simply had too many battles, and too many directions I tried to tackle at once. My todo list never once shrank faster than it grew.  Only at the tail end of this did I decide (for better or worse) to burn my entire set of goals and focus on one "simple" goal (although I must stress that nothing is simple).

If I sound like I have a bleak outlook, I don't. I still believe in this and I have something that I am proud of. This is the first time in my life I have worked on something of this magnitude, spanning 50k to 100k lines of code, and not wanted to scrap the entire thing.  I've tackled a lot of new ground so I suppose the road is destined to be bumpy, but I continue to learn from my mistakes.

If anyone has any ideas of what I should do next, I am all ears.  At the very least, I feel obligated to be transparent about my current situation.  There is no outcome that I fear, I mostly just want to do what is best for everyone, even if that simply means getting a job and paying everyone back. I will probably investigate past offers I have gotten for funding, but I don't know if that will necessarily bear fruit.

One last thing I would like to make clear is that nobody owes me sympathy, and I am not even asking for it.  My situation is a result of my own choices, and the only thing that I can make better is the future. All things considered, I think this journey has been great so far, and I am curious to see what the future holds.

[...]

The January update of Voxel Quest talks about the successes and failures so far for the game.

Heres a sample:

What Went Wrong:

​Lack of focus. I bounced between many areas for a couple reasons. One reason was trying to work out deals with investors. There were a handful of significant deals that came my way but only two of them ate up any considerable amount of time. Each person that has come to me has asked for something different and most of these things I could justify as features in the long run for the engine (even if they did not have immediate priority). To be clear, this was my mistake, not the fault of any investor.

...Ultimately I decided that there is one game that I really want to build, and that was in the vein of my original vision. It does not mean that it can't be fun in the short term, or that it will take any longer to release something in the short term.
Feature creep. I constantly found myself thinking system xyz was not good enough (and maybe it was not). I kept adding in features without a clear goal, just that I would "probably need them." I don't doubt that everything I added will be useful, but prioritizing is key [...]
Being concerned with mass appeal. Yes, I need to sell copies, but I should not throw everything on the altar just to do it. Ultimately, if I am not making the game that I want to, I will lose passion. And if I don't make a game with targeted appeal, the odds are equally against me.

What Went Right:

I don't have the greatest feedback mechanisms but it seems people are generally happy and impressed with my work so far. Somehow things are all coming together in the code, in ways I would not expect. I had never written a fluid simulator, yet it turned out well. I had never written a character animation system, but I was pleased with the results. I had never written a networking client or server (beyond trivial examples), yet somehow I did it (even though it is a simple TCP deterministic architecture, it was not trivial to write). I guess if nothing else, I have gained faith that I can tackle pretty much any task, given enough time.

Other than that, not really sure what to put here. :) There are plenty of ups and downs, but I remain confident in the outcome of the future.

In an update Gavan Woolery outlines the changes to the rendering tech behind Voxel Quest as it has undergone a few revisions since it funded.

Since its inception, the rendering technology behind Voxel Quest has undergone 3 major revisions. The first was isometric chunk rendering (every voxel computed at a pixel scale), and you can find an explanation of how that worked here. The next revision added perspective, and meshed those voxels with a point cloud. The current and final revision only renders visible surface points, and it procedurally generates these in real time. Arguably the isometric rendering looked the best of all the methods, but I also spent over a year refining it. The current revision is only 3-4 months in so give it time to mature. :)

The fact that VQ has undergone three tech revisions over two years probably seems a bit ridiculous, and maybe it is. Something like this would normally kill a game. That said, the point here is not just to make a game (plenty of people are doing that already), but to make a unique engine, and that could not happen in a vacuum. All I know is that I am finally happy with where the engine is at in terms of performance and flexibility, and I couldn't have gotten here without knowing everything I've learned since the start.

More recently Gavan has also increased the view distance somewhat.

Gavan Woolery's kickstarter game Voxel Quest was funded this week.

I just posted this on Hacker News, thought I would share here as well.

The HN community was instrumental in getting my campaign funded, so I just wanted to say thank you. I also wanted to thank the investors who offered through HN, your offered support and praise has really meant a lot. This funding will allow me to keep the company private and hopefully one day fully open source everything permissively (full source is going public on Github in a few months regardless). I am streaming Voxel Quest all day with the new perspective camera being demoed on twitch.tv (link below), and I will answer any questions here as well. VQ is in its last day of Kickstarter if you still want to pitch in. Thanks again everybody, I moved beyond words. :D

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8572611

Greg Micek of Cliqist took the time to interview Gavan Woolery, and ask him a few questions about his new kickstarter game Voxel Quest. Here is a small sample.

Cliqist : What is Voxel Quest? What makes it special?

Gavan Woolery : Voxel Quest is two things: a game and an engine. Most people would say “pick one” but I am just building a game and the engine is a side-effect. It is a fairly unique engine so it would be a shame not to open it up and share it with others. Most of all, I am only one person and I probably cannot build anything nearly as cool as other people might be able to with the engine. Keep in mind many games were conceived as mods, including Portal, DoTA, Team Fortress, Counterstrike, Gary’s Mod, etc.

On the game side, the simplest comparison I can make is Dwarf Fortress. But it has a few game modes, including a sandbox/ruleless mode designed for people who want to easily implement their favorite tabletop game, where you can play a virtual dungeon master and spawn items / enemies / events, place characters, place buildings, and so forth. These two modes are pretty closely tied together as the tools I use to test are the same tools used in the sandbox. The primary difference between the game and sandbox mode is that you are passing some control to the AI when you play in game-mode.

Gavan Woolery posted a few more updates for Voxel Quest that talks about a new twitch stream, the games funding, and shares a new updated trailer for the game.

Stats

We have not gotten any coverage other than Hacker News and a few relatively niche blogs and forums.  Many game sites have covered my work in the past including Rock Paper Shotgun, Kotaku, and Destructoid, so I don't think its because this is not newsworthy, but because they are not aware that this has launched.  I think (I hope) that things may pick up if we get any coverage.  Also, for those unaware of stats, 17,000 video plays is not a lot.  In short, I think a lot of people are still in the dark about this launch, which is my fault for not promoting enough (I have some though, don't know if my emails are getting through).  We also have very little funding from Kickstarter because this project has not been featured at all (to my knowledge).  The vast majority of pledges actually came from Hacker News and Twitter.

New Branding

I hate the name "Voxel Quest" and so do you (finally something we can all agree on!).  It was never intended to be permanent, as I discussed elsewhere but I did not think the backlash would be big enough that I would consider new branding so soon.  The name was originally created so that I could get a trademark-infringement free domain name quickly that was easy to remember and descriptive of the tech (since I had no idea what the game would be like at that point).

I'm considering new names, open to ideas.  It must have a .com domain name free without any tricks like numbers or dashes. :)

New Trailer

So, I redid most of the trailer, not sure if it is better or worse, but hopefully it conveys a few things better, such as what I've discussed at:

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/voxel-quest-voxel-based-roguelike-rpg-and-engine.94666/

(Discussion is still going on there, by the way - hop in!)

Primarily I wanted to convey that - even beyond the few technical blurbs I throw in for good measure - this is a cool sandbox tool that players and modders might be able to make interesting games with, and (another thing I failed to point out) is that it has great potential for a tabletop simulator.  In fact, in the "rule-less" sandbox mode, you can move anything around, spawn stuff, etc - great to play a dungeon master or host a digital version of your favorite tabletop game).

Some people have told me to ignore the gameplay, there is nothing to show in that regard, and others have told me to ignore the tech, gamers don't care about it.  I'm trying to please both crowds to some extent, so hopefully my message is ok. :)

Twitch

I'm also going to be streaming via twitch now that I've recut the trailer, I will post the link in a new update as soon as I have it up.  I have two dogs, a baby, and they are building a new house next door, so expect plenty of awesome background noises! Any questions / concerns, as usual, let me know.

Gavan Woolery posted a new post on his website about how he spent the last year developing Voxel Quest. Also don't forget to help fund the game on Kickstarter.

Voxel Quest One Year Update (Roughly)

It has been about 6 months since my last major update.  In that time I got married and had my first child (it's a girl!).  But aside from real life I've been neck-deep in voxels.

So what has changed? A lot - a huge amount.  There are plenty of visual changes but also tons of things under the hood - not so much (premature) optimization, but really a restructuring of a good portion of the engine to make it easier to work with.

One small, but major change is the support for voxel super-sampling.  Everything you are viewing has been rendered to bitmaps that are 1/4 to 1/8th as large as the bitmaps used for chunks in the previous video.  This reduction in buffers for the chunks has led to a massive decrease in the memory needed to store chunks - since chunks are stored volumetrically, every reduction of 2 decreases memory by a factor of about 8 (2*2*2).  So a reduction of 4 leads to 4*4*4 or 64 times less memory for chunks.

Here is another game on kickstarter asking for $30,000 to get funded. The game is called Voxel Quest from developer Gavan Woolery. Here is a brief description of the game.

What is Voxel Quest?

Voxel Quest (henceforth, “VQ”) is a single player, turn-based, tactical, roguelike role playing game.  It also features an isometric, procedurally-generated, voxel-based world.  But what really differentiates it from most modern games is the emphasis on dynamic storytelling.

The generated stories are not simply a collection of random events, but take into account classic storytelling mechanisms (the hero’s journey, conflict, character archetypes, etc) while avoiding common pitfalls (plot holes, deus ex machina, predictability, telling rather than showing, etc).  Most of these things are achieved with either abstracted properties (especially in the case of character archetypes and personalities), or with predefined transitions that play out a bit like cards in some board games (i.e. Spartacus).  The fact that everything is driven by an AI ensures there are no logical fallacies in the plot, and that many emergent, surprising, and sensible things occur in a playthrough.