Upvoid Studios

Upvoid Studios is a team of six game developing computer scientists, located in Aachen, Germany. We have been developing games together since 2011. Back then, we worked in a game development workgroup at the RWTH Aachen University.

After finishing our last bigger project in summer 2012, we had the idea to create a game with Minecraft-like destructible terrain. But instead of blocks, we envision a smooth and graphically appealing world. Philip wrote a prototype that made us confident that the concept can be realized on current hardware. In early 2013, we began development of a game engine supporting this kind of terrain.

This game engine has now become the Upvoid Engine, with UpvoidMiner being the current showcase game.

Looking for more information? Head over to the FAQ page. We have collected answers to common questions there. If you still want to know more, you can leave us a comment with your questions there.

Upvoid Engine

The idea of this project is to write a game engine that supports huge, procedurally generated worlds and destructible terrain.

There are currently only very few projects featuring destructible environment without blocks. It is not only cool to have this feature in a graphically more realistic, non-blocky setting, it also has some technical advantages over blocks. For example, we can render the environment with a much higher viewing distance. The technique we are using still allows hard edges and blocks, but they can have arbitrary orientations and don't need to be aligned to any grid.

We always liked the idea of procedurally generated worlds. If done right, they give you a diverse and beautiful, infinitely large, virtual world. Also, we think that games like Minecraft, Terraria or Garry's Mod represent a new genre of creative games, with a potential that is absolutely underestimated among major game developers.

Our goal is to combine those concepts into a sandbox game. This sandbox would not only be a Minecraft-like game, but could also be used as a level editor and game engine. It should be moddable easily so that everybody with a bit of programming knowledge can create new game modes, mods, or even complete games.

Looking for more information? Head over to the FAQ page. We have collected answers to common questions there. If you still want to know more, you can leave us a comment with your questions there.

Modified on Feb. 7, 2014, 12:39 p.m.