Playing with Blocks

To be honest, I mostly just played Skyrim this week. And I regret nothing!

How do I say this? Basically, I wanted to make Minecraft before Minecraft was a thing. Or, more accurately, I wanted to make a game like Dwarf Fortress that was played from a first-person perspective. It annoys me now that making such a game would immediately be taken as a Minecraft knock off, when it'd really be a Dwarf Fort knock off. Truthfully, the Terraforming game is actually this same idea, but with a different theme.

I started on such a project during my senior year of college. This is as far as I got before schoolwork and prepping for graduation started monopolizing my time.

What I learned from the experience is that Minecraft is much more technologically impressive than one might think. My project ran at about 15-30 frames per second, where a comparable Minecraft world easily did 60 on the same computer.

Recently I've been thinking of starting up the project again and working on it. For now, I want to stick with a fantasy theme, rather than working on the Terraforming game. The reason for this is that I have a much clearer idea of how I'd want to carry out the design in a fantasy setting. Fortunately, most of the work should carry over to a game set on Mars.

Before I left the project, I had only accounted for square blocks. In an effort to make things look a little less blocky than Minecraft, I'm going to include other block types. These are the three basic shapes. Each of these can be rotated and scaled to produce many different shape types. Additionally, the shapes can be inverted (replacing empty space with filled space, and filled space with empty space) to produce more even more shapes.

Hopefully, by next week, I'll have something more to show. However, given that both Thanksgiving and my Anniversary are coming up, I'm not anticipating getting a lot done.