Minecraft inspired RTS

[gftweek]

Castle Story

Still in the pre-alpha stage, but it looks promising. You design castles and designate mines, and your bricktron minions gather and build for you. At a later stage they will add fighting and castle defence features.

They are using the Unity engine, which I know little about, so not sure how scalable it will end up being for larger worlds or multiplayer, but the 3d physics and graphics seem okay.

Also watch the video response to the demo video from the website.

[SilvasRuin]

I don't recall them saying at any point that they were inspired by Minecraft. And if we're going to start guessing at their inspirations, Dwarf Fortress is infinitely more likely to be their primary inspiration as it's the same exact genre as Castle Story. I'm reluctant to call Dwarf Fortress style games RTS's. They're very different beasts. Though I can't say I can propose anything to call them other than the vague term "Civilization Sims". Not to be confused with The Sims, though Sim City is kind of in that vein.

[Katalliaan]

I'd definitely say that it's closer in gameplay to a cross between Black and White and Dwarf Fortress than it is to Minecraft. Still, something worth paying attention to.

[Flesh_Engine]

I like their explaination about why they chose 1*2*1 blocks instead of simple 1*1*1 blocks and, reading between the lines, have gravity effects as well.

If i recall correctly Notch tweeted about it a month or two ago, been following it since.

[gftweek]

I don't recall them saying at any point that they were inspired by Minecraft. And if we're going to start guessing at their inspirations, Dwarf Fortress is infinitely more likely to be their primary inspiration as it's the same exact genre as Castle Story. I'm reluctant to call Dwarf Fortress style games RTS's. They're very different beasts. Though I can't say I can propose anything to call them other than the vague term "Civilization Sims". Not to be confused with The Sims, though Sim City is kind of in that vein.

I haven't played Dwarf fortress but I can see the similarity, the flying islands and destructable block landscape is what made me think of Minecraft which more of us have played than Dwarf Fortress. To be honest my first thought when I saw it though was Populous, although I remember little of it beyond torturing villagers, it does seem more at this stage to be a bit more of god genre game than an RTS. RTS's usually have much more fixed rules about base building, population and resource gathering, but this seems more fluid.

I'd definitely say that it's closer in gameplay to a cross between Black and White and Dwarf Fortress than it is to Minecraft. Still, something worth paying attention to.

Black and White to me is epitomised by the giant animal avatars more than the villagers.

I like their explaination about why they chose 1*2*1 blocks instead of simple 1*1*1 blocks and, reading between the lines, have gravity effects as well.

Yes, I'd be interested to see how their gravity works, could you build an inverted pyramid castle balanced on a single block flying island, and destroy it by removing the natural block? I guess it might lead to the ability at some stage to make the gravity defying blocks. It looks like most of the building will be bar based than cube based, but the environment is cube based.