Edit: I just wanted to preface this by saying I think this is a very cool demonstration and a great first step towards a game: I should've made that clearer in the rest of my comment which continues below.
I point that out because every month or so someone creates a "voxel"-based terrain generator with basic building and gets branded a "Minecraft clone", as if that's all there is to one of the most abnormally successful indie games of all time.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot more than that just that to make something that's actually fun to play and is comparable to even Minecraft in its pre-alpha incarnations.
And if his success wasn't enough, Notch was comparatively fast at developing Minecraft (at least initially). Within a couple of weeks of the video I linked above, he had water and multiplayer working[1]. Nevertheless, it still took another 2.5 years to get to a 1.0 product, and Mojang is still hacking away at it. Skycraft, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have changed at all since it was last featured on HN[1] two weeks ago.
I don't mean to be a negative Nancy about it: I think it's great to mess around with this stuff and if playing around with a basic Minecraft/Lego-esque builder scratches a gamedev itch for you, that's awesome.
But it seems really premature to start asking for money for it[2], even as a "Kickstarter"-type pledge drive: I'm not sure I'd even consider this a MVP or proof-of-concept yet. Skycraft today is, relatively speaking, the easy part, and really more of a technical demo: there's no game here yet.
Best of luck to the developer, though: I'd love to see if they stick with it and make something really cool. The other ones I've seen all seem to die off shortly after being featured.
It's interesting that so many people don't like this common class of article (I cloned X of Y in Z time), which I find very positive and hacker-like.
You are actually posting a common class of comment, which I don't much regard, but is unfortunately a formula for lots of karma.
X clone is not nearly as good as Y original for Z reasons. And of course the implied statement, or explicit in this case, that the hackers who made it shouldn't show so much pride or ambition.
I clearly failed at the point I was trying to make then. To be clear, and I should've been more emphatic about that in my original comment, this is a great demonstration of skill and ingenuity. The creator should be applauded for creating it. What it's not is a game, much less a "Minecraft clone".
There was a story the other day on Hacker News about not being able to impress developers[1]: that there's a tendency amongst developers believe whatever someone else did is easy and they could do it in a fraction of the time. Almost every time someone hacks something together that sorta resembles prior art, what I see is a rush to label it a clone of something else that's really successful, as if the work of the really successful product could be cobbled together by anyone who has a couple of hours/weeks/months of free time[2].
All I'm trying to say here is that while this is very cool and the creator should keep at it because this could be a great start to something new and interesting, there's a whole lot more work to do to make a game out of this and let's collectively temper the implications that all Minecraft is is a basic terrain generator.
I don't think your second link is a good example of what you are talking about. They spent a really long time building a framework which, they claim, let them build a replica of Snowfall in an hour.
The narrative wasn't that they spent a really long time building a framework so anyone could build Snowfall in an hour, it was that "the NY times spent hundreds of hours building Snowfall, we did it in an hour" implying that if you spend more than one hour working on creating something like Snowfall, you've wasted your time.
Even if had been the more forgiving narrative, it still ignores the 6 months the New York times did doing interviews, compiling the photography, and writing the piece itself. The technical part was, comparatively speaking, the part that took the least amount of time on the NY Times's end. You can't replicate Snowfall in an hour, even with Scrollkit's help.
I think the problem is that it feeds the "I could write this thing in an afternoon" mindset many programmers have, which could be seen as harmful to realistic time estimates or respect for the last, hard parts of making a product/game.
For those who stick with these kinds of projects, it would be much more interesting to hear about what happens next, in retrospect. The discovery of the next 90 percent of the work, then the next 90 percent after that, and after that. Moving from the idea, through the exhilaration of the almost-playable proof-of-concept, to the inevitable standoff with the devil in the details. The frustrating process of becoming acquainted with the unknown unknowns.
I think these type of experiments are good for personal projects, but to clone someone else's work and charge for an unfinished ripoff seems like a scummy thing to do, especially when notch is such a valuable member of the dev community and a great model of indie dev success. Not only that, but the game markets itself as a clone and even steals part of the Minecraft name. When has that ever been acceptable in a for-profit context? I'd find this a lot less annoying if it were free and open source, as long as it didn't have reverse-engineered Minecraft source code.
The *craft name might be temporary, I haven't really decided yet. But at this point, it just gives people the right association, because the gameplay is so similar to Minecraft :)
As for my scummyness: Didn't Notch do a somewhat similar thing with Infiniminer? Didn't he build on it, make it better/different, and charge for it early? Just because it isn't much more than Minecraft right now, doesn't mean it won't be in the future. And there are some big differences already, like the theme of the world, the block size, and the technology. Hopefully, in time I'll get to show how big an impact all three can have on a game! :)
As for Notch, I couldn't agree more with you: He is a very valuable member of the dev community, and someone I have an incredible respect for.
Well what do you call it? It's clearly not a complete clone, but what do you call something that is obviously based on or inspired by something else to a high degree?
Do not most games get inspiration from earlier games? Aren't quite a few FPS-games quite similar to the ones preceding them? Or RTS-games? Aren't most games iterations, improvements and variations upon an existing foundation that we collectively build on to create ever greater games? :)
There are games that take entirely new paths. But most games, actually most GREAT games are built on foundations of many, many other games, while introducing something new. And that's what I hope Skycraft will do.
Hi, the creator here! :) You have many good points, and the main point I want to address is: why let people buy it already? I have thought quite a lot about that, so here are some of my reasons for releasing early:
- I had been working on it as a side project for quite some time, and the feedback of friends can only go so far. Getting honest feedback from strangers, both good and bad, is a great motivator to spend even more time on Skycraft. But even more so, the best feedback and motivator is having people actually buy your game. It is incredibly motivating to have someone else than your mom buy your product because they like what they're seeing, and it pushes me to spend more time, knowing I have customers I cannot let down.
- The possibility of doing Skycraft as my summer job. By releasing before summer I could check to see if there was enough interest that I could possibly spend my summer working on Skycraft instead of my usual tech consultancy internship. And there was definitely enough interest! It's not like I've even made enough money to cover even one week of consultancy pay, but the response I have gotten on Skycraft has made this two of the coolest weeks I have ever had, so it was a no-brainer to spend my summer on it.
As for the point about Minecraft's progress vs Skycraft: Notch is a very experienced game programmer, and he has a lot of "tricks up his sleeves". If I remember correctly from his blog, he already had some NPC's from an unfinished game that he could sort of dump in there. And the same is might be true for a lot of other stuff, like collision detection and networking.
As for me: I'm first and foremost a web developer, who has a passion for games, and recently started making them :) So there should really be no surprise Notch was faster, in fact, it would be a real shame if he wasn't!
Oh, and I've had exams for the last two weeks, with the last one finishing today. Expect a lot more coming in the following weeks! :)
Ah, naturally: the part I didn't expand enough on and probably should've just left out! :P
I think those are all fair points, and I appreciate you explaining your business model here. If I may make one suggestion: play this up a bit more on the sales page. Knowing that you're a student the funding is going towards being able to let you take a summer off to explore this further significantly changes things: it's less preordering a game (the impression I got when I saw this) and more seed money.
And about the part about no work being done in two weeks: I didn't meant to imply that Notch was the baseline and that you were slacking off, but that Notch is a speed demon in the early stages of game development and can build out whole v.1 systems in a few hours or a few days. So there's some danger in comparing Minecraft at X point in its development and a similar game at a similar point in its development: "Minecraft had these N features 6 months later, so that means this other game is going to be in a similar state in 6 months as well" isn't very likely to turn out to be accurate.
At any rate, what you have here is still cool notwithstanding my negativity, and like I said in my original comment, best of luck to you: can't wait to see where you go with it!
Based on the first video you link (F9t3FREAZ-k), it seems Notch has a very distinct advantage already (a game-like element). In that video, he wanders around the cave systems for a long while, and always finds a path through. I assume that 'Cave game tech' demo is generated (not static as the Skycraft demo appears). But it's not just randomly generated. It's generated in a way that always affords a path through. This isn't even common IRL. Spelunking real caves is partly about finding ones that are non-trivial and traversable by humans (vertical faces and narrow sapces tend to inhibit that).
In all seriousness, I think his points are valid and well-articulated. This just comes across as a tech demo and nothing more. I can't imagine what advantage re-creating Minecraft in HTML5 would have in and of itself. There's just... nothing new here.
Even if Skycraft were just a Minecraft clone there would be a ton of cool things you could do because it's WebGL: Giving your friends a link they can click to join or spectate your world. Embed your world in your blog. Crossplatform... But Skycraft won't be just a Minecraft clone. Hopefully I'll get to show you that later this summer! :)
Right, it's a "social game" that encourages intelligent gameplay. Building it as an open platform that others could add logic (say in asm.js modules) would be a cool hook. I'm encouraged by what Minecraft is doing in making a very nerdy game cool, and supplanting mind-numbing entertainment or purely violent games for younger kids. Having something like Minecraft but instantly accessible though the web could be a good way to bring new players into the genre, even if they end up being Minecraft players at some point.
The guys that are making GooEngine, that recently reached front page of Hacker News with their Perl Boy[1], also did a pretty good clone Minecraft Classic[2]: https://apps.facebook.com/gooblocks/
I think of an MVP as the least you need to do to demonstrate an unmet demand for a product or concept. For a game, that means demonstrating a gameplay concept that may be worthwhile to expand upon.
Thinking about early Minecraft, the creative version became an MVP in my mind when it got multiplayer and a variety of building blocks; the gameplay element there being working with others to create artwork. The survival version became an MVP when it added monsters and an infinitely generating world, which allowed exploration and, well, survival.
But if you look at Skycraft today, it's billed as a "creative voxel adventure game", but there's no adventure. It fails the basic test of what defines a game: there is no gameplay. It needs some sort of basic challenge to overcome, goal to reach, or ruleset by which to reach a win or lose state (to be clear, it doesn't need to be a fully fleshed out concept or demonstration: Pong is an MVP for a tennis game).
Skycraft does, however, demonstrate a very cool block-building generator done in HTML5. That's a very cool tech demo, but it's not yet a proof-of-concept of a game.
To get to an MVP, it needs to add some gameplay elements. If it's supposed to be an adventure game, there needs to be some sort of undertaking or goal to work towards played out through an experience the player has.
But beyond that, if you're going to try to create something that's a new spin on Minecraft and show there's an unmet demand for it, I think you have to demonstrate at least one gameplay element that Minecraft doesn't have. Skycraft doesn't have that yet.
And there's definitely a strong case to be made that there's a demand for games like Minecraft that have a different vision: there's at least a half-dozen "ripoffs", just as many (if not more) games that can directly trace their lineage through Minecraft, and hundreds of mods for Minecraft proper that radically change how the game works.
I almost wonder if you are interested in creating a new take on Minecraft, the easiest way to get to an MVP is to create a mod for it first and worry about the engine after you have something that's fun.
> And there's definitely a strong case to be made that there's a demand for games like Minecraft that have a different vision
Minecraft-GTA mashup, maybe? That is, voxel-based riff on GTA street-view topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5810285). Or maybe iCEnhancer-based Minecraft? I'd pay cash money for that.
It's more of a tech demo than an MVP considering he is selling a game. The only substance of interest right now is knowing that, yes, this is an engine that can render a voxel world.
I think he's referring to the M part, as in he does not feel it meets the minimum requirement for making this a viable product. (Acronyms have meaning)
As an avid Minecrafter, I don't see what this adds to Minecraft. Sure, there's more blocks (I actually see that as a downside, increased block resolution means that it takes more work to build something) but what's the killer app? It's also annoying that it requires fullscreen to play. Why can't I multitask?
It's worth noting that one can play Minecraft in a browser [0], so Skycraft doesn't have that as an advantage. Yes, Minecraft requires Java, but that won't get me to buy a poor clone of a game I already have and love.
Well, there are some comments just about that in the "coming soon" part, and it seems that the selling point is about making multiplayer easier for you compared to Minecraft.
Whereas you have to host a Minecraft server yourself (or host a world on a LAN) in order to play multiplayer, Skycraft doesn't require you to do that. All you have to do is share a link with your friends. In addition, you can "[i]nvite anyone to fly or walk around in your world in spectator-mode", which I optimistically intepret as "walk around in my world without buying the game". (Of course, that's my take on it.)
The selling point of a game is never what language it was written in. That is one of the last things (if it ever is) on a consumer's mind when deciding whether to spend money on a product. It mostly comes into play when considering modding.
That you can run it in the browser without plugins at 40% the speed of native code, probably without offline support, need them to be online to do multiplayer, have to redownload the whole thing every time you clear your cache and want to play it again, have to deal with browser quirks and the browser adding a level of instability? Doesn't sound attractive to me. I don't like the obsession with moving things to html5 that have no place in a web browser, at least as far as implying it's a legitimate goal for serious production. It results in apps that lag generations behind in performance just so we can say "look ma, no native code!"
> That you can run it in the browser without plugins at 40% the speed of native code,
Minecraft isn't written in "native code" either. Have you noticed any problems with this demo? I haven't.
> probably without offline support
Wrong.
> need them to be online to do multiplayer
? Of course you need to be online to do multiplayer...
> redownload the whole thing every time you clear your cache and want to play it again
What cache are you referring to? The normal browser cache won't affect this at all. Sure, you can remove appcache, localstorage, indexeddb data, but why would you? That's the equivalent of uninstalling a game.
> have to deal with browser quirks and the browser adding a level of instability
What does that have to do with you as a user? The developer has chosen to work around such issues because he/she sees benefit to being in the browser.
Minecraft uses a lot of native libraries via JNI[1]. Specificly the openGL rendering has been pushed out to native code due to both Java speed issues, and support for opengl features beyond OGL 1.1. As essentially all skycraft entails is a rendering of a pregenerated map with some minor UI and deformability, the parts of Minecraft this compares to are infact largely native.
It was pretty slow for me. I'm using Firefox on a relatively high-end laptop.
>? Of course you need to be online to do multiplayer...
You know on many desktop games you can host servers without needing any central authority or even your internet online right? Like in Minecraft? Quake? Halo? is the LAN forgotten?
Well for people like me who actually play games, we care about things like Frame rate, mouse latency, and load times. The day a browser improves on these attributes, will be the day it's a selling point for us.
I'd hesitate to call Skycraft a game geared towards consumers, despite the developer's intentions. It feels geared toward the hacker crowd because of what's going on under the hood.
As I created my sweet tree house and bridge to the other islands in your game, my thoughts of "wow what a capable developer" kept turning into, "Why's a talented person like this working on a clone of someone else's work? Why not invest this energy in an original title and truly shine?".
If you're talented enough to put together a clone, you're talented enough to create an original title with it's own audience. Maybe this is just an exercise but I do hope you iterate this towards something unique.
If anything here's a list of things that I HATE about minecraft and that you can use to differentiate yourself:
- I hate having to harvest blocks. I wish I could just click once and immediately harvest the block. Someone made a browser game like that a while back (forgot the name) and I immediately spent hours building a city because it was so much more intuitive and easy.
- I hate having to collect all the blocks I've broken up by walking over to them. Just give them to me directly.
- I hate having to harvest a block in order to plant it somewhere else. I wish I could just harvest a block type once and then be able to infinitely use copies of that block.
- I hate the closeness that I need to be in order to harvest and plant blocks. I'd love to be able to build something 20 blocks or so away from me rather than have to be close by blocks.
- I hate how Minecraft didn't explain anything in-game. I shouldn't have to rely on an external source to understand a game. Call me stupid but I think this is terrible user experience and is just taking us back to the days of games that required strategy guides or online faqs to beat.
"- I hate how Minecraft didn't explain anything in-game. I shouldn't have to rely on an external source to understand a game. Call me stupid but I think this is terrible user experience and is just taking us back to the days of games that required strategy guides or online faqs to beat."
The XBLA version of Minecraft has an in game guide, and many people prefer that version because of it. I think there is an assumption that on the PC and mobile versions of Minecraft players will always have easy access to a browser, but that there would be too much friction to look up info in a browser on a console (requiring you to quit the game or look it up on an external device).
About the "clone of someone elses work" part, I find myself repeating this, but I think it is worth repeating:
Do not most games get inspiration from earlier games? Aren't quite a few FPS-games quite similar to the ones preceding them? Or RTS-games? Aren't most games iterations, improvements and variations upon an existing foundation that we collectively build on to create ever greater games? :)
About all your points of hatred: I'll note the wish for a "creative mode"! :) And Skycraft will definitely explain more ingame when starting than Minecraft did. Although there was a charm to go online to understand Minecraft, it's not very user-friendly.
Thank you for your great words and great feedback! :)
It's probably mentioning that the open-source and awesome http://voxeljs.com/ has more of the base features of Minecraft than this, and much better performance too. If you're planning on building a Minecraft clone, don't reinvent the wheel!
Voxel.js is great! But it didn't exist when I started, (so it wasn't really re-inventing the wheel at that time) and it lacks some of the things which I have spent the most time tuning and getting right, like lighting and ambient occlusion. The lack of these features is also part of why voxeljs has better performance at the moment.
I contemplated changing to voxeljs when it came out, but Skycraft has some properties that might not fit properly into a generic voxel engine.. the islands, for instance, allow for some unique optimizations. And the small, one-color blocks allow for other optimization again. So it wouldn't be easy to make Skycraft work with voxeljs, or use the optimizations of Skycraft in voxel.js.
Right, at first I thought this was done by the creators of voxel.js. Perhaps this was an exercise for the OP and that is fine but it seems there is a fair bit of reinventing the wheel going on here.
I'm on a 30 inch monitor (and whatever the standard resolution is) and when the game was loading in full screen, the explanation text went way into the white clouds and it became very difficult to read.
29 inch monitor here on Google Chrome (latest) in Windows 7 and no problems here. Looks great having all of that extra screen space with that background.
Thanks for taking a screenshot; I'm only on a 1680x1050 22", so I really have no good way of testing large resolutions! :) What's your resolution? Is it any better now, care to take a new screenshot? (Proxy debugging/designing through HN ftw)
You can create a virtual machine with arbitrarily large resolutions (VMWare supports it) and test there - The vm's screen will be rendered into a window with scroll bars.
I'm not sure of many advantages, other than having an extra button or 2 available for the pinky finger. Otherwise it's basically just a matter of shifting your keyboard about an inch right or left.
I started as a WSAD user in 1999, but I turned EDSF in 2004. (And I'll argue the letters should be arranged in "up-down-left-right" pattern, not "up-left-down-right" :p )
More keys available on the left side. Easy to find by feel given the tick on the F, not to mention (but I will) that it's the natural location for your fingers to return to.
I'm more about the speed of things. I played a ton of twitchy 1v1 UT2k4 and had all weapons that would see real use mapped to a key right around my left hand. Also, jump on right click. Jumping was crucial to movement and the throw time for the spacebar had an (to me) noticeable effect.
No doubt about it. I think Elite was the first first-person, 3D game that I played. It pretty much wired my brain to y-invert, with lots of reinforcement from Flight Simulator II and Starglider... carrying it over to Doom and Duke seemed most natural.
While we're on the topic, Google Maps has mousewheel zoom backwards, too, and now it has become convention. Jerks.
I think this game has some real potential, but in its current state I don't think it's worth backing. I think that the most deciding factor for me at least will be efficiency. I am waiting for the day that someone creates a voxel game with near infinitie sized worlds that has a super efficient way of generating "chunks" (they don't even need to use the concept of chunks) that makes the game run really fast. To me, that's the largest downside to Minecraft and something that could really be improved upon.
World generation is definitely one of the most time-consuming bits, and Skycraft is nowhere near where I want it to be at this point. It'll get much better, and I'll keep experimenting with new ways to store the blocks instead of as pure voxels. But I think the chunks will be there in some form or another, as it's a very natural way to not have to send ALL the vertices of the world to the GPU each time you build a new block :)
There is something very wrong with the camera/movement for me. The camera seems to be "tilted" to the side, and perhaps offcenter from the movement? Like if I had eyeballs coming out of my right bicep instead of my head. Mining also seems to happen somewhere to the right of the center of my screen, not from the middle.
It took quite a while on my machine to load. The green rotating block on the right shows the loading progress. If you don't see that, chances are that WebGL is disabled or not supported.
I thought that green block filling up was a really nice playful touch. Letting us get closer to the game during a loading screen with an in game element gave me some positive anticipation for when the load would finish.
That's quite weird. It would be really awesome if you could open your developer console when this happens (cmd + alt + j) and then copy what it says and send it to bugs@skycraft.io :)
Nightly builds are quite scary.. using as much new APIs as Skycraft does, there's always a big chance that a small change breaks something. Does it work in stable Firefox for you?
One question, is this a bug? When I started playing, the blocks I created were large, and I couldn't mine, but after hitting esc, then resuming again, the blocks I created were 16th the original size and I could mine small blocks.
The brown block in the foreground here is the first size I could create:
http://imgur.com/R3ywZ6T
Pretty nice. I found a spherical cave with a 3x3x3 cube of some light-blue material suspended in the middle. Have i found diamonds? =D
The light-blue blocks emit light when they are in block form. The illumination looks quite good and seems very reminiscent of the original Minecraft illumination technique, where light "leaks" through holes. Props to that!
You found the "Gravity crystal"... which currently does very little except glow, but that will change! ;) Thanks for the kind words! I tested several different illumination techniques, including having shadows depend more on the direction of the sun, but the "Minecraft-radiance" lighting just looked the best in this kind of world, in my opinion :)
I looks pretty cool and just that fact that it is 6 dollars was enough for me to buy it and see where it will end up. But I always buy games that are that price as long as it doesn't look totally broken and is kind of cool.
Thank you! Seeing people buy it this early is a great motivation for me, and is the reason I can quit my summer internship this summer to work on Skycraft instead :)
Hum.. it seems your antivirus might react to Skycraft using a lot of memory, which it seems to associate with a certain exploit. What browser are you using?
The state of the demo is about where Notch was about this time in 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k
I point that out because every month or so someone creates a "voxel"-based terrain generator with basic building and gets branded a "Minecraft clone", as if that's all there is to one of the most abnormally successful indie games of all time.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot more than that just that to make something that's actually fun to play and is comparable to even Minecraft in its pre-alpha incarnations.
And if his success wasn't enough, Notch was comparatively fast at developing Minecraft (at least initially). Within a couple of weeks of the video I linked above, he had water and multiplayer working[1]. Nevertheless, it still took another 2.5 years to get to a 1.0 product, and Mojang is still hacking away at it. Skycraft, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have changed at all since it was last featured on HN[1] two weeks ago.
I don't mean to be a negative Nancy about it: I think it's great to mess around with this stuff and if playing around with a basic Minecraft/Lego-esque builder scratches a gamedev itch for you, that's awesome.
But it seems really premature to start asking for money for it[2], even as a "Kickstarter"-type pledge drive: I'm not sure I'd even consider this a MVP or proof-of-concept yet. Skycraft today is, relatively speaking, the easy part, and really more of a technical demo: there's no game here yet.
Best of luck to the developer, though: I'd love to see if they stick with it and make something really cool. The other ones I've seen all seem to die off shortly after being featured.
[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEAHqgZU-0o
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738984
[2]: http://skycraft.io/#buy