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Comment by brink | Hacker News Reader

> In conclusion, I have no regrets.

I'm also deep into making a Minecraft-like game with a custom engine in Rust with WebGPU. Having worked in dozens of languages, I've found Rust to be extremely productive for what I'm building. It's been great, and I have relatively few complaints.

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There has yet to be a single successful minecraft-like game despite it being one of the most common projects for gamedev beginners. Seriously, spend time in a gamedev discord and see how often people talk about their voxel game.

So I'm curious what makes you and your game different. I think one of the traps here is minecraft-likes have fun algorithms so people get nerd-sniped on the technical side but the gameplay side and art are severely lacking.

What is the definition of “success” you're using here? It seems like a solo game dev could operate with their own unique definition of success since they don’t need to convince others to adopt their approach.

just because you don't know them, does not mean they don't exist

Wrong, Vintage Story is successful.

Define successful. Are the devs working on the game full-time?

Yes. It has an active player base that is growing daily.

That's not what I asked.

You asked them to define successful. You asked them a question. I see them answering the question and defining successful.

You are, by definition, 100% wrong.

You asked them to define successful, and they did (implicitly). The fact that you also provided your own arbitrary definition of successful seems largely irrelevant given that you asked them for their own, regardless of whether VS meets yours.

https://www.vintagestory.at/aboutus.html/

"The Team - The list of currently active game developers, part-time and full-time"

Doesn't say who's full-time, but it's a team of 14 with 3 programmers.

How are these 2 things related? Why do devs need to work on a game full time for it to be successful?

If that's your criteria for success then yes, there are many such games that are successful. Do you seriously think Minecraft is the only voxel game that can support its developers full-time?

Minecraft doesn't use voxels

I suppose it depends on what you mean by "uses", but it does store the map as voxels, even if it renders via a polygon mesh.

I agree. Any reasonable person would agree VS is successful.

Who says the author is looking for "success" the same way you seem to think. Perhaps just writing it for their own enjoyment, fun or learning is success enough?

After all, anyone who takes a look at the games and game engine market can quickly realize that the market is so over saturated with content that most people can't give their stuff away for free. In fact most people would have to pay people to have a look at their content/tool/game.

Correct, I'm building it for fun and the challenge and have learned quite a bit about performance in the process. I don't expect it to be a commercial success. It's also been quite good at getting the attention of potential employers, where they see that if I can make this, I can build something great for them too.

I'm in the middle of building out a custom entity system, and learning about the speed limitations of smart pointers, and to occasionally embrace unsafe Rust for the best performance at the cost of a bit of safety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoPyClyO_QU

That looks great!!

Thanks for the compliment!

7 Days to Die is a minecraft-like game that has sold 18 million copies. As of this moment has 92,580 players playing which is 16th out of all games currently being plated on Steam.

Are you saying it's a minecraft-like because it's a survival game? Because 7 days to die does not look like a voxel game. How was that not obvious to you from this discussion?

> Because 7 days to die does not look like a voxel game.

Here: https://7daystodie.wiki.gg/wiki/Block

Speaking of successful voxel games, Space Engineers also seems to be well regarded: https://store.steampowered.com/app/244850/Space_Engineers/

I’d also put Empyrion up there, though it was a bit niche: https://store.steampowered.com/app/383120/Empyrion__Galactic...

Oh also definitely No Man’s Sky: https://store.steampowered.com/app/275850/No_Mans_Sky/

Here's a cool video on how they did things for that game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCRzxEEcO2Y

Also teardown!

> 7 days to die does not look like a voxel game

It is definitely a voxel game. Both games also share the same core gameplay loop of mining blocks of materials and using those materials to build other blocks elsewhere.

The wikipedia page for the game literally says "The game is voxel-based (similar in some aspects to Minecraft, but with smooth terrain)".

The fact it doesnt look like one proves your point wrong. There are many other places in the voxel game space which are as yet untapped.

No, I'm saying it's a minecraft-like because it's a voxel game.

> There has yet to be a single successful minecraft-like game

No? Off the top of my head, there's Teardown, which has sold over a million copies and has rave reviews.

And there's a lot more games that use voxel-tech but don't make it part of their core aesthetic, especially for terrain deformation/mining. Notable examples include No Man's Sky and Deep Rock Galactic.

Minecraft-likes are among one of the most successful game formulas.

Some examples:

No Man's Sky (survival, voxel, proc gen)

Astroneer (survival, voxel, proc gen)

Valheim (survival, proc gen)

Enshrouded (survival, voxel)

Terraria (survival, proc gen)

Like it or not there's a lot to be gained from learning how to make a Minecraft-like. Does making one guarantee success, NO, but same goes for any other type of game.

Of these, I'm familiar with Enshrouded. Although I suppose it's voxel based in a sense it's not really voxel-based like minecraft is. Like instead of displaying the voxels as is, the game interpolates them into smooth shapes. Also characters and placables are high-poly like you would expect from any other game rather than blocky like in minecraft.

The effect of this is that it's actually quite non-obvious that it's voxel based unless you pay careful attention.

I don't totally follow how this is relevant to the thread? If you make your own game engine, you can design it to display the voxels however you wish. It seems odd to dismiss Minecraft-like games as unsellable when many Minecraft-like games have sold very well by expanding on the gameplay and visuals. There is no reason why the developer in this article can't do the same.

There's also the fact that the map is fixed rather than procedurally generated, that there is a story with voice acting and plenty of lore scattered. To me the differences are large enough that I don't consider it minecraft-like. But I guess that's a matter of opinion.

No Man's Sky Astroneer, Enshrouded are not voxel games AFAICT. Of those, I've only played No Man's Sky, which I agree at some level is similar to Minecraft in gameplay

Astroneer is indeed a voxel game. With some trickery to make it appear differently.

They may not look it, but the underlying terrain is done with voxels. It's harder to notice because the voxels are smaller, and use techniques like marching cubes to render smooth looking angled surfaces.

Here's a GDC talk about No Man's Sky world generation:

https://youtu.be/sCRzxEEcO2Y?si=H0r5zPRfO1CCeZ_m

Voxels doesn't necessarily mean something looks blocky like Minecraft.

Yep, tons of games behind the scenes use it.

I used to read this guy over at procworld.blogspot.com (as I type this I'm not sure if it even works anymore) who developed a very nice Voxel engine he ended up eventually licensing to game studios like SOE named Voxel Farm which was intended to be in EverQuest Next.

It had tons of features way beyond a simple Minecraft clone. I was always blown away at what was possible and the tech behind it.

I think we have different definitions of Voxel

I don't think so?

They use voxels under the hood but still render smooth graphics with techniques like marching cubes.

I think you are underestimating voxels or don't understand how they are applied in modern game development.

If those aren't voxel games, neither is Minecraft.

That's like saying games don't use polygons or triangles to render because when you zoom in everything looks smooth / no triangles.

Minecraft already exists and has had over 10 years, hundreds of millions of dollars of development, and a broad modding community. You can't just displace it with a Minecraft clone.

Early builds of Deep Rock Galactic look extremely Minecraft-like. There are plenty of others depending on what you consider Minecraft features.

I’m curious what makes you think each and every snippet of code has to be monetized and turned into a product?

Minecraft doesn't use voxels

It absolutely does, as the definition of a voxel is, roughly, "a 3ormoreD regular grid of point-samples".

If it doesnt use voxels what does it use then?

I think the game Teardown is the golden child of voxel rendering in production video games. beautifully lit, fully destructible, and performant

Polygons. It renders the blocks using traditional polygons

Voxels are not a rendering technique. They are an internal representation of the game world as a set of points on a (usually) 3D grid, as opposed to a fully pre-rendered map. Voxels allow for destructibility and full reshaping of terrain, for instance.

Yup, makes perfect sense after thinking about it more.

There are quite a lot of successful voxel-based games; see https://voxel.wiki/wiki/projects/ for an incomplete list.

Most people think voxel means 'cube' or 'block', but really it just means "regularly spaced sample in a 3-or-more-D grid".

The voxel gamedev community tends to call Minecraft-y voxel games "bloxel"-based.

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