So, what's the deal with this block game anyway?

If you’ve been following me on social media you may have noticed that I’ve been working on a block game for the past couple months. It is, temporarily, called Block Game. There’s even a website with an FAQ and a mini devlog feed made up of my Mastodon posts about it. But what really, is this Block Game? Where did it come from? Where will it go? I hope to explain the inspirations and vision for the game in this post.

Disclaimer: nothing in this post is a promise let alone a guarantee. This is an outline of where I intend to take things, but this is game development and things can and will change.

First we’ll look at the aesthetic. For this I went with something less sharp and angular than Minecraft. Yes, Block Game is made up of 1 cubic meter blocks, but I’d like it to feel organic despite that. The fake bevel the game applies on blocks, combined with the outline, really helps soften the look and feel. For textures I’ve decided to go with a look that feels a bit like stepping into a 3D version of a 16-bit console RPG. And for models Block Game will feature a sort of Mega Man Legends low-poly PSX style both because it’s an attainable style but also because it fits the vibes. Everything will not be made up of tiny little cubes. And for the GUI I’ve gone with a sort of Final Fantasy style with big crunchy dithered gradients, which I think feels very nostalgic.

Next, lets look at Ultima as an influence. The Ultima series (and specifically Ultima 4 through 8) were hugely influential on me as a kid and were in no small part responsible for me getting started with game development at an early age. I’ve written an entire blog post on what Ultima means to me so I won’t belabor the point further; suffice it to say Ultima is going to be a big influence on block game.

And you might think that’s a bit odd, right? Smashing up Ultima with Minecraft-style block breaking and building. But I’ve spent quite some time in various Ultimas taking over and decorating various haunts and buildings, even building a house from logs and drawbridge parts stolen via the hack mover cheat in Ultima 7. In Ultima Online people built entire communities with the housing system, and eventually it got the ability to design and build custom houses, a feature of which I took full advantage.

So if you ask me Minecraft and Ultima are a bit like peanut butter and jelly. You wouldn’t necessarily think they’d go together, but I think it could really work. In fact I think a destructible environment (with the right constraints) actually fits pretty neatly into the kind of immersive sim elements the Ultima series helped pioneer. After all, Ultima is the series where you can pick a lock, or you can just roll a nearby cannon over and fire it at the door to blow it off its hinges. Is busting down a door with an axe or a wall with a pickaxe “Here’s Johnny!” style really that different?

But how is Block Game going to be like Ultima? Well, I want Block Game to have an immersive, living world. That’s a bit of a nebulous concept though, so what I mean by that is that in Block Game the world should feel like it’s not just there for the player, and the world and its people continue to exist even when the player isn’t there to observe them. Of course this isn’t actually possible, some fakery is going to be required, but that’s the goal.

With that goal come things like towns and villages settled by NPCs. I know a little bit about procedural generation, having released a traditional roguelike and having taken stabs at procedurally generated fantasy worlds multiple times in side projects over the years. One thing I’ve learned is that while infinity sounds cool, it’s much easier to generate interesting things in your world if it’s finite. You can do things like connect towns by roads, make sure there’s a good mix of them, attach dungeons, and much more that isn’t impossible in a Minecraft-style infinite world, but is orders of magnitude harder to pull off.

So Block Game is going to take place on a large island. Now, don’t you worry, I have ideas for a late game system with which you can fund expeditions to additional islands you can then visit. So you won’t run out of non-renewable resources.

One other thing that Ultima (and the Elder Scrolls, which I’ll bring up later) does well is environmental storytelling. If you don’t believe me, ask Majuular. Since there won’t really be a main plot for people to ignore (we all know it’s true in these types of games) Block Game will have to lean heavily into that sort of thing. Of course, there’ll also be lore, sometimes explicit from written books found in the world, sometimes hinted at.

All of this civilization does mean that Block Game won’t be as much of a pure survival crafting experience, and that’s by design. It’s more of an open world sandbox RPG, which also features crafting. There’s going to be multiple possible starts for your character (there may even be Ultima-style questionnaire character generation), and the harder ones will involve more survival and or crafting than the easier ones which will start you off in civilization where you can avail yourself of the world’s economy.

While this means that crafting is more optional than it is in Minecraft, that also allows Block Game to have more immersive and in-depth crafting than Minecraft does because players won’t be forced to engage with it in the same way. Now I’m not saying the game’s going to go all Vintage Story on you, but my goal is to have crafting be diegetic and in-world (without menus) as possible. In order to do this the basic means of crafting is to interact with items by using one item on another: another thing Ultima pioneered.

This style of interaction already exists in Block Game right now with a crafting loop of using flint on sticks to create an axe, cutting down trees with that axe, using the axe on the logs to get wood, using the axe on the wood to cut it down to sticks, and using those to make torches. And not only is this style of “use X on Y” targeting pretty intuitive and more immersive than some alternatives, but it’s also helpful for quickly and easily making different item interactions, which will speed up developing content for the game.

For more complex crafting I’m imagining specific crafting stations, like a crude carpentry bench, which can hold ingredients like wood, cordage, and sticks. You place your ingredients on the table, where you can see them in the world, and then use the bench to craft the desired item.

Another aspect of a living world is decoration. A world won’t feel alive unless it feels lived in. The later Ultima games like 7 and 8 and the Elder Scrolls games do this very well, with lived in spaces decorated with appropriate furniture and an assortment of baubles and knicknacks that you’d expect to see in places people actually live and work. This sounds tricky, but I’ve created a robust decoration system for MidBoss that I can borrow for this purpose. The other thing are the baubles and knicknacks.

In Block Game you’ll be able to decorate by placing items from your inventory in the world. You’ll be able to drag them around and line your shelves, set your plate and cutlery on the table and, if you want to be particularly messy, drop your dirty clothes on the floor. You’ll be able to rotate these items and they won’t despawn. In fact, the system that allows items to be displayed in the world is also in Block Game already, although right now the controls to drag and rotate them don’t exist yet.

Okay, all this living world stuff and decoration and crafting is great, but what about the meat and potatoes of an RPG, the exploration, combat, and character advancement? Well, because it is a block game character advancement will be much more item based. Now don’t mistake this for me saying the game will have a Diablo-esque loot grind of ever better drops. Think more along the lines of a system where generic “experience” is replaced with item resources that can be used to level up parts of your character but not others. This solves a few problems, but the most important one is that if consumable items take the place of experience then you’ll rarely run into the kind of issue where you battle your way to a chest full of loot, none of which means a damn to you.

For combat I don’t want to go into too much detail but I can say that I’m taking inspiration from games like Guild Wars 2 and Overwatch, in that different weapon types will come with different ability kits to customize your playstyle. That, and that there will definitely be bosses in the dungeons of Block Game that you can fight using your favorite weapon kit.