Hello all, been a lurker on these forms for a while, and looking for some feedback on my game.

It's a fairly standard voxel adventure/crafting/building game, but with the goal of providing more content and unique challenges, and much more involved combat. The Kickstarter page has a lot more detailed information: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1004271201/roothaven

Does the overall idea sound interesting? Approach so far? Constructive criticism appreciated!

I think you have to address the elephant in the room, which is this feels 100% like minecraft. You could probably make a minecraft mod to do what you are trying to do. So convince me this isn't basically minecraft.

I think rpiller seems to have hit the nail on the head. The project as described in the Kickstarter looks like an ambitious Minecraft mod. A mod of an existing platform would quickly overcome obstacles like multiplayer support and overworld generation, allowing the team to focus on the novel content. Apart from hopes of financial success, why reinvent the wheel?

You make a good point. There are a lot of great Minecraft mods out there even now, but even in the mods, combat in Minecraft is plain awful. There's only so much you can change with a mod before reaching a point where (I believe) you should just start over.

I don't enjoy re-inventing the wheel, but it's scary to think about putting so much effort into a project only to eventually hit a wall where the base platform just doesn't offer what you need. I feel like it's time to break away from relying on the Minecraft engine. It's buggy and I'm a fan of native support rather than relying on Java.

Perhaps this still seems unreasonable, but at the end of the day I want an engine with fully exposed source code and completely under my control. For example, say I wanted to make a voxel shooter game next, or a MOBA, or a tower-defense game. I could easily tweak and re-use my engine, whereas trying to get Minecraft to suit these needs would likely result in unacceptable latency and some awkward "hacky" solutions.

Financially, I know mods can do fairly well for themselves, but I still think it's unfair to continue supporting Minecraft. Honestly, I feel that the mods have far surpassed the original game, and that the original game was quite lazy.

There is a "write it from scratch" mentality that's easy to fall into as a developer, e.g. my code will be better/cheaper/faster than anybody else's, which can be dangerous. Having said that, if you're determined to do it make sure that you're actually offering a variety of desirable features that Minecraft doesn't. Otherwise you've just spent a lot of time re-writing Minecraft. ;)

I would need far more details on how the combat is going to be an improvement on Minecraft before I can really give feedback on this game (beyond what's already been said). MC has two distinct weapon types that function differently (swords and bows) so...what else are you going to add? What other games would the combat be akin to? Will it focus on timing like Dark Souls? Speed like Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance? Combos like Street Fighter? Something different I did not imagine?

For combat, Dark Souls is a good comparison indeed. Melee weapons will be the bread and butter, but will offer different speeds, attack ranges, damage, staggering, stamina usage, etc. Shields, similarly, require varying amounts of stamina to block hits, but have a slow-recovering timer that limits usage in battle and promotes good timing rather than hiding behind shields. Bows will be fairly standard, more of a utility than a main weapon type. Magic will be consumable items usable by anyone, strong but high resource cost.

Does that help?

Another interesting reference for combat is Overgrowth.

For combat, Dark Souls is a good comparison indeed. Melee weapons will be the bread and butter, but will offer different speeds, attack ranges, damage, staggering, stamina usage, etc. Shields, similarly, require varying amounts of stamina to block hits, but have a slow-recovering timer that limits usage in battle and promotes good timing rather than hiding behind shields. Bows will be fairly standard, more of a utility than a main weapon type. Magic will be consumable items usable by anyone, strong but high resource cost.

Does that help?

It does, thanks; I do like the D.S. model for combat, I think it adds a lot of value slowing down the systems to allow players to experiment with them more, while not lowering the cost of each choice (since the damage is so much higher per hit).

and re-use my engine

We all have been there at one point or another. Making engines instead of games that's it :) From my personal experience, the moment you start thinking of reusing some parts of your code in other games you might make in the future your game is doomed.

Financially, I know mods can do fairly well for themselves, but I still think it's unfair to continue supporting Minecraft. Honestly, I feel that the mods have far surpassed the original game, and that the original game was quite lazy.

Then make your game lazy too :) That's the beauty of simplicity, they made just "infinite world where you build anything you want from identical cubes coloured differently".

The problem I see all those Minecraft clone devs stumble upon is the core simplicity. Minecraft's idea is insanely simple and there is simply not much to add... At least not without removing the core fun which is unrestricted construction of things.

Take a look at the Castle Story, probably the only Minecraft "clone" that is original (at least I can't name any other, maybe there are others). Note they changed a huge part of the gameplay (non first person, managing "creatures/builders/peoplez" instead of tools, flying islands instead of standard land).

(if I were to clone Minecraft I would go that way, there is a sick number of standard MC clones, and almost no CastleStory branch clones - as a player I would play one...)