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.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5807770

[2]: Another recent example where months of work was reduced to "we did it in an hour": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5747418

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.

Without overly optimistic estimates, I'm not sure anything would ever get done.

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.

We like this kind of hacking, we just don't like obviously bullshit titles like "minecraft clone". It's not even close.

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?

A game? :)

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.

Implementation of the rendering algorithm.

That's the only similarity.

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:

- Why not sell it? What do I lose? :) Many people might not buy it now, but some actually have, and that's great! I think this post might also have been an inspiration: https://garrickvanburen.com/archive/your-minimum-viable-prod...

- 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).

> I don't mean to be a negative Nancy about it

Sure about 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.

well.. it potentially works on fxos :P

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/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5755653

[2] their demos here: http://www.gooengine.com/demos/

Just curious, how is this not an MVP?

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.

EDIT: typo.

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)

Because it's not really viable?

Minecraft was a clone of Infiminer and had insane viral growth before it was anything more than this.