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.