Voxeliens

About

Space Invaders is Taito's 1978 fixed shooter, the first video game with endless gameplay and the template for the fixed-shooter genre, in which the player uses a horizontally moving laser cannon to defeat descending waves of aliens. Voxeliens is a retro-style voxel-graphics arcade shooter in which the player defends their planet from waves of descending enemies, pitched by its developers as a 3D take on the Space Invaders formula. It was originally a commercial release, later open-sourced under the MIT license; prebuilt Windows binaries are available, along with an early, harder-to-compile Linux version.

How it differs from the original

Unlike Space Invaders' fixed 2D playfield, Voxeliens uses 3D voxel-based graphics with free mouse-driven camera rotation, and adds collectible power-ups, bonus points for fast level completion, and a points penalty (rather than instant loss) for letting enemies crash into terrain.

Getting started

Windows players can download a pre-built binary from the project's download page; Linux users need to compile from source, which may be difficult since the game was originally built as a commercial project with only limited effort put into cross-platform support. Controls are WASD to move, the mouse to aim, and a mouse click to fire.

History

Voxeliens began as a commercial game before being released as open source under the MIT license; the license bundled with the prebuilt binaries still reflects the earlier commercial terms, which the developers say can be disregarded.

Known issues & limitations

• platform: Early Linux version available; compiling from source may be difficult as the game was developed as a commercial project with limited effort for cross-platform support.