‘Castle Story’ Developers Outline Why Voxels Make Terrible Castles
The latest blog from Sauropod Studios goes back to the very basics of their upcoming RTS Castle Story and explains why it is that voxels make such bad castles, hence why they are not using them in the game.
There’s a reason that you won’t find many castles made out of cubes outside of Minecraft. Have you ever had anyone or anything actually attack a castle in Minecraft? No you haven’t and if you had the structure would soon collapse as if the tower in a game of Jenga. Cubes don’t support each other is the message from Sauropod Studios, which is why they use 1×2 bricks in Castle Story.
As you can see in the picture above, once a single cube is taken away from the wall, the rest of the cubes above it simply fall away. What you would need for a stronger wall is a way for the components to support each other via overlapping. This is why Castle Story, a game in which you build a castle to defend your population for monster attack, uses bricks. You’ll see in the shot below that by having bricks rather than voxels makes your castle a hell of a lot stronger against attack. Of course, you’re bound to get a few idiots who forget to overlap each layer of brick…
You can see how this small design decision makes a big difference in Castle Story and it also goes to prove that while voxels are good for building things, they are awful when placed under more stressed scenarios, i.e. firing a cannon at them. This just in: voxels are not the best thing ever created. The best thing about this new blog post is how it displays the developers’ way of thinking to make this an RTS that is more than what a lot of people want to call it, “another Minecraft inspired game”. While there are resemblances to Minecraft in that you can build things in Castle Story and a lot of the land is build out of destructible voxels, that is about as far as it goes.
The whole blog post can be read on the official Sauropod Studios blog and more information about Castle Story can be found on the official website.
