Skycraft: Minecraft clone in WebGL

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.<p>The state of the demo is about where Notch was about this time in 2009: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k</a><p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEAHqgZU-0o" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEAHqgZU-0o</a><p>[1]: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738984" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738984</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://skycraft.io/#buy" rel="nofollow">http://skycraft.io/#buy</a>

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?<p>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.<p>[0] <a href="http://minecraft.net/play" rel="nofollow">http://minecraft.net/play</a>

Really nice.<p>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?".<p>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.<p>If anything here's a list of things that I HATE about minecraft and that you can use to differentiate yourself:<p>- 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.<p>- I hate having to collect all the blocks I've broken up by walking over to them. Just give them to me directly.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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.

Nice work on building this!<p>It's probably mentioning that the open-source and awesome <a href="http://voxeljs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://voxeljs.com/</a> has more of the base features of Minecraft than this, and <i>much</i> better performance too. If you're planning on building a Minecraft clone, don't reinvent the wheel!

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.<p>An edge case, but wanted you to be aware of it.<p>(Firefox 21.0 + Ubuntu fwiw)

This is a very minor point, but it's difficult for me to move around in a first person environment without an inverted mouse.

Nice work. I really enjoyed the description about your infrastructure: <a href="http://haeric.github.io/2013/05/26/under-the-hood-of-skycraft/" rel="nofollow">http://haeric.github.io/2013/05/26/under-the-hood-of-skycraf...</a>

Please, WebGL demo creators, support additional key bindings. On an azerty keyboard it's unplayable.

Regular minecraft player here. Your blocks are way too small.

Chrome users need their settings to "allow sites to disable mouse cursor". Just an observation: this wasn't obvious to me.

Please, if you're going to present a demo, take time to add a toggle for look_y * invert where invert is 1 or -1. :(

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.

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.<p>Screenshot showing the tilt: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/tW2h9Dr.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/tW2h9Dr.png</a> (I un-fullscreened for the screenshot. )

Hit "Play Demo" and it went fullscreen with no indication of loading. Nothing appears to happen even if you wait. What is going on?<p>Firefox Nightly 24.0a1 (2013-06-02)

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.<p>The brown block in the foreground here is the first size I could create: <a href="http://imgur.com/R3ywZ6T" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/R3ywZ6T</a>

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<p>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!

How did you submit this?<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738984" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738984</a>

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.

Strange... My HAVP proxy picked up some of the JS as an exploit??<p><a href="http://skycraft.io/skycraft.js" rel="nofollow">http://skycraft.io/skycraft.js</a> HTML.Exploit.Heap-2

I like the small block resolution and the ability to place/break both large and small volumes. That is very cool.

Really great presentation during the loading sequence.

doesn't support international keyboard mappings properly :) else.. its pretty cool!

very nice, pretty expensive for a work in progress project though

[Insert pointless negative comment]