I like how these people managed to come up with a punny name for this project. It took me a few minutes to notice the "Block" in "Blockade Runner".
I'm going to embarrass myself and admit that I didn't even notice until you pointed it out!
So, only a few more days till the next update if they are keeping to schedule! I am excited. ^^
I thought I'd put up a couple of links.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ZanMgt - Their Youtube channel. The R1W3 video is pretty sweet.
http://www.moddb.com/games/liquid-cubed - A mod for infiniminer that they were working on for some time leading up till recently. This is kind of where they got stuck into voxel development and started to formulate the plan for blockade runner. Let me quote the relevant section, as it contains stuff not mentioned on the main site.
A NEW HOPE
We first fell in love with the freedom of voxels in Zach Barth's Infiniminer back in 2009. A whole slew of limitations forced upon games were suddenly broken with Infinimer's concept “everything matters”, and it was nothing short of brilliant. The real inspiration for us however, came from the game's infamous lava.
While expanding upon the concept of a more advanced liquid algorithm, we spent the next couple years modding Infiniminer off-and-on with many other little hair-brained ideas. Having contemplated adding “constructable flying blimps” in the Fall of 2009, we were led to an even crazier string of thoughts:
“What if you were mining an asteroid instead?”
“...What if you could walk around a starship you built from stem to stern, power conduit to warp engine, and every part of the ship actually matters?”
“...What if you could suck people out into space, blast apart a ship's power arteries, cut a ship in half, work together with your buddies to hold off a boarding party, raid derelict vessels for parts, and land on procedurally generated planets to force the locals into digging up gold for your intergalactic conquest!?”
At the time, the wishful ramblings of a 'pure voxel starship' game seemed ludicrous, and since 2009 we've added quite a bit to the wish-list for a “Starship: Infiniminer”. But after testing the necessary components in Liquid Cubed, gaining several years of experience within the voxel environment, and building a plan that will support the long-term development, we believe we're capable of pulling off this ambitious concept.
BLOCKADE RUNNER
What will follow for the tentatively titled “Blockade Runner” should be familiar to those already experienced with agile indie projects: Rapid development builds, the indie-funding-formula “pay less now for alpha”, and a team forgoing the publisher's capital investment to ensure the bold vision is never lost to 'market appeal'.
Full-time work on Blockade Runner by Nathan has already begun, with an in-development version of the game being prepared for release on April 11th . The six month plan is to focus on multiplayer with build-able, crew-able, functioning, “living” starships using cellular automata. This will then lead to further development sprints reaching procedurally-generated stations, planets, and beyond.
More information on Blockade Runner will be available as the new ZanMgt website is unrolled during the next few weeks.
I like this Aaron Harris guy already, and not just because I also dreamed of constructed flying blimp fights in 2009 (seriously!). The vision these guys have for their game is so close to what I would like from a computer game that it scares me. I enjoyed minecraft, and I think it was a breakthrough in game history in so many ways, but it is also for me a lot less than a 'complete' game. OK, technically that's because it isn't finished yet, but based on what notch has said I'm not hopeful of any serious new dimension being added to the game that would take it to a new conceptual level. Blockade runner is different. OK, I don't know if these guys have the coding ability to pull this off. Maybe the concept is just too grand, and beyond what they are capable of. But the concept alone is
so good that if they can realise it even at a basic level, they should rake in the money, support and attention needed to keep at it full time. Again, at least conceptually, I think this would leave minecraft for dead. How many people went nuts over that video of the enterprise made in minecraft? Compare that to making your own star ship filled with essential working parts and using it to fight other people in their star ships... *mind explodes*