What Is a Voxel in Donkey Kong Bananza?

Here’s everything you need to know about Voxel in Donkey Kong Bananza, from digging, carving tunnels, and more mechanics.

Donkey Kong Bananza is now available (Image via Nintendo)
An image showing the game Donkey Kong Bananza (Image via Nintendo)

You may be familiar with games such as Minecraft, Valheim, Creativerse, Pixark, and other titles that share a similar Voxel nature. For starters, this is the game’s core mechanics that let you be super creative and do stuff just the way you want to. In Bananza, Donkey Kong can smash, dig, and reshape the ground as if he were in Lego.

Why? It’s because of those invisible pixels that the developers cleverly managed to hide from your eyes. While the game doesn’t look particularly like Minecraft or LEGO, meaning you can’t see the blocks, they’re there, and it’s because of voxels, you can do this: digging and smashing everything

What Is Voxel in Donkey Kong Bananza?

An image showing DK digging a tunnel
An image showing DK digging a tunnel (Image via Nintendo | Hanannie/YouTube)

A voxel can be stated as a 3D (three-dimensional) “Pixel”. You may be familiar with the term ‘pixel,’ which appears on your TV screen or monitor, representing each dot of color. Those are 2-D pixels, but voxel is different; it’s 3D. In voxel-based games, such as Donkey Kong Bananza, these pixels are tiny cubes of space, or volume elements, and they seem to act like a standard 2-D pixel, but with depth, width, and height.   

Imagine this, a giant cube made of millions of tiny cubes, each of these little cubes is a voxel. 

How Voxels Let You Smash and Dig

This is where the developers have nailed everything; unlike Minecraft, Bananza’s underground world, the ground and the walls aren’t flat surfaces at all, but are all stacks of invisible voxels.

When Donkey Kong punches or digs, the game engine removes or rearranges these tiny cubes, and in the process, you can create your desired tunnels or craters in the ground. 

Why You Don’t See the Cubes

An image showing an easter egg while digging tunnel
An image showing an easter egg while digging tunnel (Image via Nintendo | Hanannie/YouTube)

Unlike Minecraft, you do not see the voxels, and this is where all the hard work went in. Showing too many blocks can disrupt the game’s playstyle, as gamers may not be familiar with how Minecraft works. As a result, the developers kept the complete arcade-style gameplay, ensuring that the results the end-user sees are pleasing.

Hiding these blocks also has another advantage, which may correlate with Switch or Switch 2’s hardware specifications, as showing too many objects on screen might slow down the FPS numbers. Additionally, the developers utilize smooth shading and design textures in a way that makes the world look natural, even when you are destroying objects.

Why Voxels Matter for Fun Gameplay

Just like Minecraft, you have the freedom to do anything, literally anything you would want, apart from completing levels or quests. Dig tunnels, knock down barriers, and even build shortcuts. The devs have cleverly hidden easter eggs, such as secret areas and passages that appear when you break walls, and more. Also, every time you play, you can reshape levels as per your will, basically making the game infinitely replayable.

Conclusion

Wrapping up, Voxels in Donkey Kong Bananza are the game’s invisible mini-cubes that let you smash, dig, and reshape the world on the fly, and still maintain a playable FPS figure, without overpopulating the screen and reducing performance on the Switch or the Switch 2.


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