March 3, 2026
Cathedrals, grenades, and Lobster claws
Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language
Indie dev built the engine and language; players cheer, purists gripe
TLDR: Voxile just launched its biggest “Builder’s Update” with a new cathedral world, grenades, and a Steam sale. The comments split between awe that the founder made both the engine and language, and frustration that only the language is open-source while the engine appears closed—indie magic meets open-source angst.
Gamers are buzzing after VoxRay Games dropped The Builder’s Update for Voxile—complete with a glowing Crystal Cathedral, boom-happy grenades, and a pile of new building toys—while the game goes 40% off on Steam and a demo beckons curious clickers. But the real plot twist? It’s not built in Unity or Unreal. The founder, Wouter, built Voxile in his own engine and his own programming language, Lobster, and the crowd is losing it.
The hype squad is loud: one fan rattled off Wouter’s resume—helped shape web tech like WebAssembly (a way to run fast code in browsers), worked on LLVM (software-building plumbing), invented FlatBuffers—and basically crowned him indie wizard of the year. Others are poking the hornet’s nest: Lobster is open source, but one commenter grumbled the engine “doesn’t look” open, deflating the free-code faithful. Meanwhile, jokesters are dubbing Lobster “Rust, Python, and Ruby’s lovechild,” and one zinger went full meme: this is what people should show when claiming they’re “100x” more productive with AI.
Between oohs over ray-traced lighting (read: fancy realistic glow) running smoothly on a laptop and the gleeful “build to fight” fantasy, the vibe is equal parts wonder and watchdog. Dev genius? Absolutely. Open-source drama? Oh, it’s cooking. Grab the sale, grab a grenade, and see which side you’re on.
Key Points
- •VoxRay Games released THE BUILDER’S UPDATE for Voxile, adding the Crystal Cathedral world, grenades, and extensive building assets/features.
- •A Voxile demo is available on Steam, and the game is 40% off until March 9.
- •Voxile is a co-op, ray-traced, micro-voxel survival-crafting game featuring real-time global illumination, reflections, and dynamic shadows.
- •The game uses a custom engine written in VoxRay’s proprietary programming language, Lobster.
- •Founder Wouter von Oortmersen has a deep technical background, including creating multiple languages and contributions at Crytek, Maxis, Gearbox, and Google (WebAssembly, FlatBuffers, LLVM).