[I was asked about Cubes “Where do you think you might take the game play next?” and it turned into this.]
My original motivation for creating Cubes was a combination of the “blocks out of blocks” idea — which itself came from immersion in the graphics of Minecraft — and also dissatisfaction with certain bugs, limitations, and design choices in Minecraft. As a result, I’m not just building a voxel game; I’m building a game that shares what I like about Minecraft.
(What I like about Minecraft, broadly, is survival and engineering — I like building structures and machines to make my virtual life easier.)
Now, creating a Minecraft clone would be lame, rude, closer to using someone else’s intellectual property, and just plain unoriginal. But I don’t have experience with what little exists of a genre of voxel building games to synthesize my own thing, and I myself am looking for something like Minecraft. What can I do? Here’s what I’ve been trying:
Be different.
Whenever I see an opportunity to do something specifically unlike Minecraft, that doesn’t compromise what I’m trying to do, I take it and see what happens. However, most of these experiments have failed; for example, Cubes originally had a larger-scaled player character, but this turned out bad because it means tunneling and building is 8× more tedious, and it reduces the apparent size of the world. Also, it leads to thinking “OK, add this feature Minecraft has — but (superficially) differently!”
Be generic.
This is my long-term goal, and it is one that ties neatly into the “blocks made of blocks” theme. The characteristics of blocks can be defined by building circuits (programs) inside them. What I’m aiming for is that by creating a blockset (collection of block designs which the player can build with), one is defining the game that can be played, by giving those blocks specific behaviors.
In this way, I am working towards having a game which can be programmed to emulate Minecraft.
(I have a working prototype of an importer for Minecraft worlds as well as for Minecraft blocks — that is, turning the terrain.png from a Minecraft texture pack into Cubes' 3D blocks — but I am not going to release that code until and unless I determine that Mojang doesn’t mind my doing so. I still love Minecraft and they deserve my not stepping on their toes that far.)
However, this means both that Cubes itself needs to be very generic, and that the built-in example uses of such features should feel different from Minecraft.
So, returning to the original topic of “where am I going next”, I need to add the following functionality to the game world:
Extend the circuits feature so that there can be blocks that are
active and interactive (e.g. opening and closing doors, “physics” like Minecraft falling sand and growing plants).
Add moving objects (for vehicles and mobs). I intend to generalize
these so that they are worlds in themselves — this will allow large or unique vehicles, and mean that they can be designed using the same game tools.
Add some form of resource constraints/conservation laws (as in Minecraft survival
mode) — that is, you have to gather stuff to make it into other
stuff. I haven’t figured out specifically how I want to do this yet,
and this seems particularly tricky to make programmable. One idea that keeps coming to mind is that when you break a block, specific subcubes are “resource cubes” (according to their type in the block world) which you collect, and in order to place a block you need to have the corresponding resources for its type. However, I’m not sure I like the “raw material counter” feel of this.
Add player attributes that can be modified (e.g. health) so that e.g. death, or other effects-by-the-world can be supported.
Less grandly, I plan to work on one of these specific technical features soon:
- Allowing circuit blocks to be rotated to change their connectivity. (Right now, circuit blocks have specific faces — e.g. on a certain one the +X direction is always the output.)
- Figure out what more circuit primitives I want to add. (Right now, the circuits are definitely not Turing-complete, and not capable of all the effects on the world they should be, but there are also already a lot of different primitives; I may have to invent new block-picking UI just to make them practical.)
- Add moving objects (bodies) — things which can collide with the terrain
as the player does. The current code is entangled with player
behavior, and the player does not persist in a world.
- Add subworld/multiple-world handling — the ability for more than one
world (grid of blocks) to be present in the same space. Right now, there are hardwired assumptions that the player is
in the single world’s coordinate system.
Another core feature which is currently missing is the ability to design a blockset and then reuse it for multiple worlds. The problem right now is that we're using a simple object-graph serializer, so each world has its own blockset which is modified independently. To fix this, it needs to be possible to save a blockset under a user-visible name, and have individual worlds which reference that blockset; also, the world generator needs to decouple blockset generation from terrain generation. The “persistence” framework which added support for multiple worlds is a step towards this; the main thing I am pondering is what the semantics of these separate-named-persistent objects are and what the user interface for editing them is.
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When I wrote Cubes (a browser-based “Minecraft-like”), one of the components I built was a facility for key-bindings — that is, allowing the user to choose which keys (or mouse buttons, or gamepad buttons) to assign to which functions (move left, fly up, place block, etc.) and then generically handling calling the right functions when the event occurs.
