I'm a child of the 80s and have always been a big fan and enthusiastic user of computers. Back in my day (I say that a lot these days) , the pixel was king and everything was blocky to look at. It was just the way it was and it looked at the time , fantastic.

Move on 30 odd years and graphics in games are almost photorealistic. They are amazing. I saw the game Rome on an Xbox One and couldn't quite get my head around how good it looked.

But the humble blocky pixel look has for some time been enjoying a nostalgic resurgence. Flappy Bird is a good example. With more and more indie games makers out there with plenty of coding skill but not always the art skills to match (that's me by the way), the pixel art genre is something anybody can get fair to great results from. The pixel has shook off its 2D shackles though and has evolved into a voxel. A 3D pixel. A cube to be frank, but put together they can form all sorts of cool looking things. True, 3D cubes are nothing new but they are more accessible and easier to work with now than they were in the AtariSt and Amiga days.

Which brings me on to an App I use .. a lot at the moment. It's called Voxelshop made by Blackflux. It's currently free to download and it's an amazing bit of kit.
You can plot your cubes and build things in 3D just like Lego. You can paint the blocks, remove them and also cut,copy,paste whole sections. Everything you need to build a pixel model.

As you can see , it looks like many photo editing apps and it behaves like one too. It's great fun , available on Windows , Mac and Linux and has provided me and my 8 year old son hours of amusement. https://blackflux.com/node/11

When I'm not having fun with Voxelshop , I'm making characters for my Unity3D game Super Elevation. All the characters in the game are made with VoxelShop , and it's easy to keep a good workflow because it exports to a file format that Unity natively understands (Collida(.dae)). Once I got the hang of it there was no stopping me.

I made a game with Unity3d. It was called Elev8tion and it was entertaining and did really well during a testing phase with my friends. But it had problems. It frame skipped some of the time and became unplayable if my phone wanted to do other things in the background.

It was down to too much Garbage Collection. I won't go into what that is but it's not a good thing for games. I had no idea when I went head first into making the game, and because I made fast progress over a short time, careful planning went out of the window.

So , I couldn't unravel the labyrinth of scripts and functions to make it right. It was too messy , too inefficient and unreadable. I had to concede that if i was to make this right , I had to start again.

So I did. I planned properly (or much better at least) , used some recommended techniques I hadn't used before such as object pooling. Now I have a much more stable and efficient game. I feel much better about it , so much so that i've renamed it Super Elevation. High hopes indeed. It should be ready for release very soon.

So , thank you to Carlos Wilkes for his FREE LeanPool asset for Unity. It saved the day for me.

https://sites.google.com/site/carloswilkes/lean/lean-pool