Indie-Resource.com

First of all a prototype for you to check:

http://temp.nowhere-else.org/cubicworld/

And now some description:
The goal is to make a web game running purely inside your browser without any additional plugin which let you play inside a virtual world, play quests, stories, missions designed by you, other players or by the staff. The world will offer an area for each player to let them edit it, mine it and even put quests and stories for others. Of course some mechanism to avoid cheating will need to be set in place.

The game will be first a 2D isometric game due to the fact WebGL is not yet supported on all browser (IE doesn't and it still own over 40% of the market). However as the game is actually a 3D "voxel" kind of world, it will be possible at some point to switch over to 3D first person view and keep all the content.

For the isometric, canvas is and will be used. It works fast enough for the requirements, specially if you don't resize the window up to insane resolutions.

Why recreate such game? Because Minecraft doesn't offer any true mission / storry / quest. NEaB is starting to be old and many things are not as cool as they should. So... a fresh start for me and maybe a good market to pick even if in terms of market I'm interested in players not in money

Comments, feedback, questions are all welcome.

Very awesome! I love the idea


I experimented with much the same idea but it is more 2d
http://indie-resource.com/webcraft/index.html
click several times on a block to mine, WASD keys to move

yours is much cooler!

Nice start, I thought about a side or a top view which would be actually easier to handle, yet you could not have a real 3D world, and with a world like mine, nothing prevent me to go to a full 3D at some point, where if you have only a 2D world like in your case you would still end up like in a slice... so missing some information to make it a true 3D world.

agreed. I like your perspective more. Adds much more functionality.

But it adds a lot of complication. For example, I need to imagine how to display things once you are underground, or within a building. As you still want to see your avatar and its surrounding (at least on 2 of the sides and the ground)

I was wondering the same thing but I think your angle will help a ton. I almost wonder how hard it would be to render the layers above transparent or at least 3 layers above transparent so the camera is relative to you and the top layers do not get in the way.

Will interesting to see what you come up with.


As far as IE not supporting WebGL I would not let those stats worry you. Those stats are VERY off. That counts many businesses where IE is all that is allowed and no one is playing games to begin with. A HUGE chunk of data being all over the world is actually done by Linux machines but that means nothing when it comes to game development as that is counting servers uploading and downloading data, backups, webhost transfers, ect... The stats for this site shows majority Chrome and Mozilla.

Well, I have NEaB I use as stats as well you know, and just with this simple prototype I can tell you that some of my old players already failed to run. Not even canvas! Which means they run on a older version of IE!

Also, 3D does introduce more efforts for the rendering, yet for the remaining it will be mostly the same, so I will start 2D and see how it goes, and in case jump on WebGL.

Reload:
http://temp.nowhere-else.org/cubicworld/

- An improved man art (not anymore naked) (still not the final)
- Transparency of blocks which may hide the man, which means you can now go inside a building or behind a tree and still see your guy. To test this, I added some sort of building to let you see how that works.

Comments on this idea is welcome, as I'm not 100% sure neither if it's a good solution or not.

Next steps will be to detect the mouse position and see where it hits a block (top, left or right side) such that you can place new blocks where you want. Also, I need to start the rendering for underground.

- You may now go inside the building as well as inside a "dungeon" to see how it look like.
- Mouse position is now displayed (more or less as it still need some work) by highlighting the face of the block you point at
- Left click (after a while) digs a hole
- Right click (after a while) adds a block

You may therefore starts to build odd shapes

I am loving this. Keep it coming.