We are joined by the great Wouter van Oortmerssen, founder of VoxRay Games, who are currently working on Voxile, an open world RPG which features survival and FPS elements along with a robust creator system. Aside from the game, we discuss Wouter's career working on games such as FarCry, Borderlands 2, SimCity; designing and programming game engines; the lessons of world travel; and the many challenges of starting your own game studio. | Voxile Kickstarter | VoxRay Discord | In The Keep | Support In The Keep | Theme Song by Jon of the Shred |

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Wouter:

[0:34] I first made the engine for it. I've been working on that for years. And then at some point, decided to start a company around it to actually build a game on top of it. I've been searching for a new way to do rendering that bypasses all the AAA complexity, basically, for a long time. And I had lots of experiments, and at some point, I made this voxel renderer with ray tracing, and it was surprisingly fast. It was like, I can actually make a game out of this. This is going to be awesome. And um yeah and then managed to get a team together to to work on it and we've been working on that for like the last three years um i guess summary for people that don't know what it is it's gameplay wise it's a blend of first person shooter rpg survival gameplay styles uh it's a very kind of creative game in the sense that everything is buildable destructible that kind of thing it has a unique look it's a fully ray traced game which is kind of unique even the primary view of the game is ray traced which most games that say they are ray traced don't even do so it has a very unique look with very unique kind of lighting and lots of detail, lots of voxel that looks very pretty

Wouter:

[1:56] And yeah we're bringing that to early access very soon, hopefully maybe in a month from now at the earliest.

Wouter:

[2:06] And yeah, take it from there. I guess another thing to mention is like a big thing we have is because everything is so dynamic and so buildable, we have a super nice in-game editor that allows people to build their own worlds.

Wouter:

[2:20] Our gameplay is also such that it's very easy to kind of bend the gameplay to your will. So if you're the kind of person who just wants to make an outright first-person shooter world, or you want to make a story-driven RPG world or more of a kind of survival experience. Like, all these things are possible kind of within our game. So it's almost like, I wouldn't say you can design your own game. That would be taking things too far. But, you know, you can definitely, you know, make your own kind of gameplay experience.

Tyler:

[2:48] Yeah, you can relate to your own stories within it. Yeah, exactly. One of the things that I noticed pretty quickly was that, like, all of the different levels that you're currently offering in the demo that I played, Thank you.

Tyler:

[3:00] Uh they have genres on them it literally says like this is a detective story you know etc and i thought that was nice because i will i'm imagining in the future when people are making their own content and uploading it and sharing it with people to some degree.

Wouter:

[3:13] Yeah that

Tyler:

[3:15] Will be useful for search engine.

Wouter:

[3:16] Optimization yeah we want people to to go it's like i want to play a certain kind of world i want a certain kind of experience i mean i'll find those exactly how i would do that will remains to be seen but what you're seeing is cool because basically we have a couple of in-house designers and i mostly just told them to go wild and and the results are what you're seeing in the sense that like each of them took that kind of in their own way in terms of like what they wanted to create and so yeah the downside is that we still need the world on making these work on making these worlds a little bit more coherent in terms of like storyline and whatnot that. But the upside is that you can really see that you can have very different experiences in our game.

Tyler:

[3:56] So are you the primary storyteller of the kind of the overarching branching between these different stories?

Wouter:

[4:03] I wouldn't say so. I'm certainly, I mean, I'm the original designer of this game, if you will.

Wouter:

[4:11] But nowadays we have a lead designer on board that has lots of narrative experience that i don't have so i try to i try to let people that know better do their thing when it comes to story and the designers individually like are these the ones that design the quests and then pcs and what they're saying and whatnot so with that they're shaping the story quite quite intensely as well i'm not dictating them that they should do that in a particular in any particular way mostly so yeah it's uh

Tyler:

[4:44] It's really interesting like i i had written you the other day like hey did you did you like fez or whatever but i i like that sort of meta storytelling that goes on with uh spoilers for folks who haven't played the game yet but, so you are in this world that you're you know, The theme of the game is that you're able to create your own stories and create your own world and such. And there's a part where you are confronted by this mysterious character who kind of has a moment where I would describe it as similar to the red pill versus blue pill in the Matrix. And I really liked that. I thought that was a really nice touch. And it takes you kind of like, it's not out of the story. It's like, this is the story. the story is that you are a creator maybe you're going into another dimension that you didn't really fully understand if you were just one of the other NPCs in this world and I thought that was so interesting and so cool, not necessarily the most original thing in the world but awesome nonetheless.

Wouter:

[5:44] I'm glad that's working, it's a little bit like he called it like a fourth wall breaking and that's also a little bit dangerous because some people want to just stay kind of in the atmosphere of the game So, yeah, we'll see how that develops. I'm glad you liked it. Yeah.

Tyler:

[6:00] So, I mean, what were your sort of the influences that you had for making such a game I've noticed, especially in the last several years that survivor games are getting pretty, pretty big.

Wouter:

[6:09] Uh yeah i've

Tyler:

[6:10] Seen a couple that seem to be just trying to make a survival game because they're popular and therefore you know sort of lose the ability to make a good game it's just like checking all the boxes this didn't appear to come about in that.

Wouter:

[6:22] Way oh yeah if anything i must admit like you know survival being one of the three gameplay pillars that we have but the current game as it stands is not particularly survivally we're still kind of working on that aspect if anything um and it's also partially kind of the direction that designers have taken it like they've they've made it quite question story driven which is really cool but it makes for a very particular game um at the moment and i i do think there's a lot to survival i think it blends well with the other two in the sense of like survival almost feels like an extension of an rpg in an rpg you're you're you're building up to be very very powerful uh so also survival is similar, except you're struggling like a lot more. It's both about kind of building yourself up in a particular world, using whatever resources you can get your hands on.

Wouter:

[7:15] So we want to do that. In terms of influences, so it's interesting, you know, if you go look online where people talk about our game, a lot of people go like, it's Minecraft with guns. Or lately, thanks to Notch, you know, they're going, it's Minecraft 2 or something like that. And while I am very proud of that comparison, and I think it's all awesome, it's certainly currently not a very good comparison, because we are not really like Minecraft at the moment in terms of gameplay. You know, that kind of open-ended, procedurally generated world, we don't have that. Our worlds are currently, they are all made by designers, so they're much more specific. As a consequence, they're probably also more beautiful, but they're not as open-ended as Minecraft is. that said personally I've

Wouter:

[8:01] Played thousands of hours of minecraft at this point and i love the game and the one of the things i appreciate most about minecraft is just the feeling that you're in a world where absolutely every block is modifiable like when you're playing minecraft you don't feel like you're in some kind of static scenery or whatever you know you look at any any mountain or whatever it's like i can dig right through that if i want to i can make my base right in the middle of that mountain if i i desire there's nothing going to stop me and that kind of level of agency and creativity and you know i'm in control of this world i can do with this world whatever i want to i think i think is super important and i think that's where a lot of other games fall flat you play like a triple a game nowadays and it's like yeah it highlights one thing you can interact with and the rest of the world is all completely static you can't touch you can't even move things it feels so disappointing after having played games like Minecraft, I feel people that have spent a lot of time with Minecraft to have different expectations of how interactable a game is.

Wouter:

[9:06] And that's probably the most important aspect that we're trying to inherit from Minecraft, if you will.

Wouter:

[9:14] In our game still, you'll need certain tools to be able to break certain things down and whatnot, so there's limitations. But in theory, any world you're in, if you get the right tools, you can break the entire world down. You can delete it all and just end up with like nothing um so and i think i think that kind of feeling even if you're not going to act on it that level of power is something that really appeals to certain certain group of gamers it certainly appeals to me a lot and of course you know most game designers they they built the game they want to play so and there you go so yeah a lot of influence from from minecraft um what i really do not enjoy in minecraft is the combat i think it's very clunky and yeah not that fun and i've played a lot of first person shooters in my life i think they're very fun so our game has you know has guns and you know they're a lot they're satisfying to use on like you know hitting skeletons with a sword in minecraft so i'm trying to do do better there and mix in uh aspects of other games and i think the other aspect, I guess, is a little bit more goal-driven. Minecraft does not have too much in terms of quests in the vanilla game. We're trying at least for those players that want to have a reason why they're in that world and why they're doing things to have interesting NPCs with interesting stories.

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