Benjamin D. Gibson
Game Programmer
Overview
Title
Sole Developer (assets not mine, attributions here)
Features
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Solutions to fundamental 3D game needs: voxel-based rendering and light propagation, preventive player physics.
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Minecraft’s defining qualities: real-time generation of a modifiable, persistent, endless world.
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Gameplay augmentations: slabs, ladders, alternate dimensions and village structures.
Time
8 weeks
SimplerMiner emulates features deconstructed while directly observing the sandbox game Minecraft. With the exception of libraries to load audio and image files, the C++ codebase implements the 3D game's core from scratch, supplemented by gameplay elements like villages and a Nether dimension.
What went well?
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Discovering computer graphics techniques can go beyond photo-realistic applications.
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Implementing dimensions amounted to creating a simple array of the chunks’ container.
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Concentrating on gameplay over engine features later in development afforded problem spaces with fewer standard solutions, letting me consider new programming approaches.
What went wrong?
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Player physics took much longer than expected to debug.
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The new approach necessary to implement villages repeatedly required explanation.
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Poor code quality hindered the implementation of dot product-based view culling.
What have I learned?
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Though both have their pros and cons, I prefer graphics’ open-endedness over physics’ standardized approaches.
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Time spent coding before grabbing help decreases as coding skill increases, because the problems programmers are stuck on become generally less and less trivial.
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Ease and hardship of implementation for alternate dimensions and villages, respectively, demonstrates that a topic’s semantic complexity outside the game does not correspond to the complexity of its implementation inside the game.