Where the monsters come from

Voxel Studio is a panel in our editor with a lot of sliders and one seed field. Move the sliders, and a creature builds itself in front of you — body, limbs, a real skeleton, a palette, poses. Change the seed and you get a sibling: same species, different animal. There's a strip of sixty-four candidates along the bottom so you can scrub through a whole litter and pin the one that looks like it has opinions about you.

Six body plans are supported so far — humanoid, quadruped, multi-legged, serpent, flyer, and a blob that we are fond of for reasons we can't fully defend. Everything you pin saves as one small recipe file, and Alderen reads those directly. The hound that comes at you in the mines is one of them.

The reason it works this way is that "a monster" should be a thing we can make a hundred of in an afternoon and then throw ninety of away. The studio judges them the hard way, too: we render the candidates as plain black silhouettes, unlabelled and numbered, and pick favourites without knowing which settings made which. A creature that only reads well in colour, at full brightness, from the front, is no use in a dungeon lit by one torch.

Process · not gameplay

Honest status: it's early. The shape vocabulary is narrower than we want, and there's a size ceiling we haven't lifted yet, so nothing truly enormous has come out of it. That's the next stretch of work, and it's the work happening right now.