Show HN: Real-time multiplayer games with cubes. Early feedback on dev docs?
When I was a teenager(?) at Facepunch Forums, I wrote Half-Life 2: Sandbox as a free and open source competitor to the by-then commercial version of Garry’s Mod.<p>It drove me nuts that GMod multiplayer games were declining rapidly in quality over the years and I wanted my own platform that had faster load times, better out of the box game mode experiences and so on. And I actually did it.<p>Due to some licensing agreement change issues with Valve, I ended up not taking it to the storefront.<p>But prior to that, I didn’t spend enough time marketing the mod anyway. Those who knew about it seemed to pass along some encouraging words, which was nice.<p>These days I work on Planimeter’s Grid Engine instead, and I have the freedom to do new things with it. But of course, new is always hard.<p>Anyway all that to say this reminds me of Minecraft, which is obviously a fun game. And if this has Lua and some proper bindings, it’s gonna be a blast. I’m sure it already is.<p>But it’s hell on earth trying to get people to play a game that is a spiritual derivative—of another well-established game.<p>Have fun developing this. But do it for you. Like I did Half-Life 2: Sandbox for me. All these years later, my mod still runs better than even the latest version of GMod. It does that because I put more care into it.<p>But since the Source SDK 2013 base is frozen in time, and there’s no usable Source 2 SDK, no one plays it. But that’s OK. I had fun.<p>In a similar manner, I sort of wish there would have been someone from the gaming generation before me, maybe a Quakeworld player, who would have passed on the same insight.<p>Projects this large will take years of your life in development time. You only get to work on some many of them. Ask yourself if you want to see yourself working on this in 5-10 years, or a similar title.