Update on my voxel gamemode | Create your own creatures, blocks, and items
About a month ago I started with just the creature creation system which was inspired by spore and lets you dynamically configure creatures but also sculpt them. I posted some footage showing an earlier version of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/sandbox/comments/1u3m3tp/some_test_footage_for_a_voxel_creature_system_ive/
The prior post shows more detail on how you can customize the creatures but since then I added an upright body type as well.
Once I had the creatures working I wanted to give them a world to inhabit so I added a basic procedurally generated voxel terrain and a main menu with save files for worlds. A lot of optimization needed to be done here and I obviously based quite a bit of the efficient world saving on Minecraft since they have that figured out, but I had to veer off quite a bit since this is designed to be more fluid rather than everything being premade. In the end it's roughly the same efficiency as Minecraft and worlds shouldn't grow too large even after a lot of editing or adding of custom blocks, creatures, or items.
I made a system based on my code for creature editing that instead allows you to create a custom block which you can sculpt and color to make any blocks or shapes you want. All of your saved blocks, creatures, and items are saved locally so you can access them on any world or server.
The item edit station is working and I used it to make the pickaxe and other icons in the game just like I used the block edit station to help make blocks for the world; however, I don't currently have a system for players to spawn in their custom items yet. I'm trying to work out how to best handle it like I have with custom blocks where you have a sensible mechanism to get them. For custom blocks you take clay to the clay station you can form it into blocks that look like any of your custom made blocks and you can then place them down in the world like any other block. This also limits spam of new block types into the world since they do need to be stored on the server even though their size is very small in the condensed binary form.
I'm terrible at art (as you can probably tell), but I'm trying to solidify the foundation so more artistic people can do more with it. The idea is that people who enjoy building in creative mode would be able to fully customize everything where if a block or creature doesn't exist for their build, they can simply create it in game without me needing to manually add everything. (I want to add vehicles later so you can make custom cars, boats, planes, zeppelins, etc... eventually too).
I'm really focused on getting the actual foundation working well but I would love some feedback from people on what they think and what suggestions they have. Especially if it helps me steer away from being a Minecraft clone since I don't want to just build Minecraft and it looks way too similar now after adding the procedural generation. I'm having a lot of fun just working in the engine and getting things to work but I'm still lost on what the core loop of the game should be. The world types are setup where I can create completely different gamemodes and maps with it so I can keep a more traditional adventure Minecraft style mode but prioritize a better option for the main mode(s).
