So you have three different Voxel Farm flavors to pick from: Creator, Indie and Pro. But before adding anything else, a word of caution: There are rough edges. The documentation lacks coverage for many of the things you can already do with the engine.
We are committed to this project for the long run, and we will be providing constant updates. We want to deliver rather than make promises or hype new features. I do not see this release as early access, or as request for the community to crowd-fund us. This software is released as-is.
In the proper hands there is a lot that can be achieved. There is no question you can use Voxel Farm today to make your next-gen killer game or app. Also, if you run into trouble you can always contact us and we will do our best to get you back on track.
The INDIE license gets you access to our SDK and the Voxel Studio creation tool. Here the engine core remains in binary form. These are C++ libs you can link into your project. The SDK contains a dozen of different examples, including full source code for a Unity plugin. Very important: the Unity plugin uses a DLL, so your game will be Windows only. Also you will need to develop on a Windows machine. There is a one time fee of $295 USD, and a recurring fee of $19 USD per month. When your project has grossed more than $100,000 USD, a 5% royalty fee is applied. While your subscription is active, you will get free updates perpetually to the SDK, example code and tools.
The PRO license gets you full source code, plus the SDK, plus Voxel Studio. There is a one time fee of $995 USD and then a recurring monthly fee of $95 USD. If your project makes more than $100,000 USD, a 2% royalty fee applies. There is an important twist here: The PRO license is organization-wide. It means your company only needs to purchase one license and it can be re-used by many different individuals within the organization. This also applies to the Voxel Studio tool. The INDIE license, on the other hand, is for just one individual.
And there is the CREATOR license. Here you get the Voxel Studio tool for $19 USD a year. Voxel Studio allows creating new worlds from scratch, including the different materials available for procedural generation and voxel editing. It also has fully functional L-System and grammar editing. The current version has limited exporting capabilities, so at the time your creations may be locked inside Voxel Studio, or you may be limited to collaborating with people and groups who have licensed INDIE or PRO. Whatever you create using this tool belongs to you. This is pretty much a content creation tool like Photoshop or Maya.
You can check out the license agreements in our online documentation.
As usual let me know what you think. There is a lot of hard work into this project, the team has done great. I also want to thank all of you who stopped by at our booth at GDC. It was great meeting you all and sharing our vision of the future with you.
(Photo: Michael and Rados at our booth at GDC 2015)
