Hi!
I'm glad that I've finally published my first unity project - Surviverse. The official website address is:

http://surviverse.com

Surviverse is an open-world sandbox game. I have a lot of ideas and below I placed a short description of my work (the final goal):

At the beginning of the game player has nothing. He starts as a castaway in some unknown, mysterious world. As the name suggests, he must do everything to survive, which includes keeping his energy high enough (hunger + fatigue + physical damage to his body) and not getting killed by some creatures. To do this, he must collect some resources and build a shelter. Later, he can dive into researching magic or technology. Both branches provide awesome items and abilities and finally let the player go to space or jump into different dimensions to explore new, dangerous worlds...

The game is based on voxel terrain similar to other games, but with a significant difference: terrain is far more detailed than usual 1m. It is possible due to advanced techniques used and Unity optimizations. You can build at very high resolutions like 6cm and still keep your performance high. Soon, I'll implement terrain generation on GPU, which shall accelerate the game so much that terrain generator will be able to use high resolutions for things like heightmap, etc..

For now however, the project is in its early-dev stage and has only a few basic features (world, inventory & crafting, building) implemented. The only mode player can play now is creative. An infinite world is generated and then player can craft world modifying items like: Stone Bricks Hollowed Cylinder (material + shape + some other relevant data) and use them to build what he wants.

Get more information about the project at: http://surviverse.com

I have a development blog up and running and all new stuff concerning Surviverse will be published there: http://surviverse.com/development-blog

The game is available for download here: http://surviverse.com/download, but I'd recommend to read help articles before playing.

I plan to update Surviverse regularly. New posts/updates should appear at least every week.
I you want to support the project and get quicker updates, let me know you're interested by following my twitter: https://twitter.com/Kiel366 and Google+ site: Surviverse on Google+

I attach two of my screenshots (see full gallery at: http://surviverse.com/gallery).

So now, go to my website (http://surviverse.com), download the game, read some help as the controls might be quite confusing and play the game!

Write here or on the website what do you think about the project and build something awesome and upload it in this thread as I want to see what you can build.

Hope to see you on my website and in the game soon!

I don't know if this is by coincidence or not, but you are using a name extremely similar to what I've been using for my project, Survivor.

The idea of the game is also extremely similar.

Most peculiar is the fact the umbrella for my project, which includes the engine, is called the Survivor Universe.

https://github.com/viveret/Survivor_Universe

The current repo is 8 months old, and the project is 3 years old.

">This is the first video I posted about the game, with the name Survivor, 3 years ago.

I had no idea about your project and used none of your code.

The name comes from my gamedev post: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/653765-a-name-for-the-game-struggling-to-find-an-appropriate-title-for-a-sandbox-game/

and the idea was consulted with gamedev users on: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/627790-alternative-minecraft/

So it's basically a coincidence. I have no intention in copying other projects if you suggest it. Sorry.

I don't know if this is by coincidence or not, but you are using a name extremely similar to what I've been using for my project, Survivor.

Maybe it's a coincidence, but there's also a popular TV show with the same name!

More than one game called 'Survivor' (or similar) that's about surviving isn't exactly unexpected. I wonder how many RPGs have the name 'Dragon' or 'Warrior' or 'Dungeon' in their title?

And 'Universe'? Surviving is about you vs the wild. So either something involving beasts, mutants, or zombies, or else common words like 'Land', 'Map', 'Global', 'Island', 'World', 'Galaxy', or, yes, 'Universe', are the low-hanging fruit.

Survivor game + Open world sandbox? They go together so commonly that it's practically its own subgenre.

Nothing in the OP's game description is unusual for games in this genre (his description could describe multiple different games people are working on or have already released), so the fact that the game is too similar to yours is scarcely coincidence or stealing of ideas - it actually just indicates that neither of you have been creative enough to stray too far from what existing games have already played with.

It's like a dozen people standing in one starting location (existing sandbox survival games) and everyone faces outward and heads off in a different direction to pitch their tent. If you only take two steps away from the starting point, you can't exactly turn around and say to other people who also didn't travel far, "Hey, why are you encroaching on my tent-space, dude?!"

Ofcourse the real innovation occurs with how you execute on the already-been-done-a-dozen-times ideas, so even though you're both starting at the same location many others are starting from, your final products might look incredibly distinct from each other by the time you are all the way through.

I'd love to see where you both take your games.

@Kiel368: You mentioned, "He starts as a castaway in some unknown, mysterious world.". I enjoy that basic idea, and love things like the common "washed up on a island after a shipwreck" type of games. One of the key strengths there is exploration and mystery, as well as unravelling and discovering the background lore of the world.

With games that are fully procedurally generated, like Minecraft, it was fun to explore and find nice geographical oddities (huge canyons, vast caverns, mountains, forests, etc...), but it didn't fully satisfy my cravings in the same way hand-crafted worlds do.

Procedural terrain and random dungeons lack real... history... to them. The environments themselves lack story. I don't mean game 'plot', I mean... background lore, only seen in part, half-occluded through the veil of time. That's what creates that atmospheric ambience of mystery to pulls me into a game world.

When you say, "He starts as a castaway in some unknown, mysterious world.", my mind leaps to games like Myst and Riven (which by the way, is only $6 on GoG.com).

How do you intend to truly capture the sense of the unknown, the sense of mystery, in the world of your game - or is that not one of your primary design concerns for this project?

Hi Servant!

Firstly, I'd like to thank you for your contribution to the project. I mean your long post with game titles, found here: (john798 is my second account)

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/653765-a-name-for-the-game-struggling-to-find-an-appropriate-title-for-a-sandbox-game/

Of course, you're perfectly right about sandbox game ideas, which all seem the same. However, a description is still just a piece of text. I like the idea that new, unique things come to your mind, when you're doing, so I'm just doing. Did you know that at first Minecraft was called Cave Game and was an exact copy of Infiminer? Everything unique to this game came later and I think that's what gonna happen with Surviverse too.

About the idea of a castaway: When I reach the stage of creating Survival Mode, I'd like the plot to be similar to this:

Somewhere in the universe a high-tech civilization lives. You are a scientist and explorer on a huge spaceship, which gets crashed somewhere beyond the known cosmos. You land on the unknown mysterious planet. First, you need to survive. Then, because of your curiosity (you are a scientist), you start exploring the world. Soon, you discover minerals needed to build your known machines, but you also discover some sort of weird energy, which you think can be used and be even more powerful than any technology you know... As you acquire more knowledge about it however, weird things start to happen. You are in danger...

So yeah, you see that this is gonna be one of the main ideas.

But before further posting, please at least visit my website to get a full picture of things or just play this game to see what it is like.

 

I had no idea about your project and used none of your code.
The name comes from my gamedev post: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/653765-a-name-for-the-game-struggling-to-find-an-appropriate-title-for-a-sandbox-game/
and the idea was consulted with gamedev users on: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/627790-alternative-minecraft/
So it's basically a coincidence. I have no intention in copying other projects if you suggest it. Sorry.

 


I wanted to point it out because if your game goes far and people start searching for it, they might confuse it for mine.