(I know the name is bad, I'm uncreative)

I'm a fan of Minecraft, and always wondered what would happen on an infinite server, so I decided to try something similar.



Build stuff! It is coded with JavaScript, AJAX, and PHP, no downloading required.

The world size is only limited by my web hosts's HD space - if you scroll to a section that isn't generated yet, the server will generate it for you. The world is stored in 26x20 chunks, each is 4-6KB.

I'd like to see how this will turn out, not sure if there will be a well-built city, a bunch of pixel art, or just random spam. Feedback would be appreciated!

Credit for inspiration goes to Minecraft, Drawball, and PlayPen, not that I'm trying to compete with any of those.

Sorry about the lack of a video. I realized that I need to switch to another lua library to stop the crashes, and it's taking a while (I'm also moving the metatables from Lua to Java to increase speed a bit).

I updated the first post to be less confusing and include screenshots as well.

I used to keep my desktop quite organized, now it's more like "let the crap pile up and clean it off once every 4 months or so." I do obsessively sort my crap alphabetically by name though

My main problem is that I download everything to the desktop, then get too lazy to delete the installers.

I was using Samurize but never bothered to reinstall it after I reformatted my hard drive.

The plan:
-First, just keep working on the game until I could reasonably call it complete.

I know where you're coming from, I think. I was terrified charging for my game before it was "complete", but I figured that the only way to make money was to actually ask people to pay for your work.

I took a "pre-purchase" route with a big discount if you bought the game during alpha, and a few premium only features for paid users. A year later, and the game is STILL in alpha (getting close to beta now, though), and had I not charged for it, I'd never had lasted this long.

My point, I think, is that "complete" is a bit of a slippery slope, and as long as people are enjoying your game, why not charge for it?

Not sure if prepurchasing would work for me; I'm not established as a good indie developer yet (other than a few small games, up to now I've mainly done PHP scripts), also, even though I like programming I'm not sure if I'd want to be legally obligated to "finish" my game.

My first post probably wasn't worded well, by "complete" I meant something that people were actually willing to play. Right now, I only have some buggy alpha test builds, due to my major procrastination problem :p

I've been working on Buildsim just for personal enjoyment and experience. A couple of months ago, I realized that I might be able to make some money from it as well. I came up with this plan for the next few years, but I'm not sure if it's good or not... I'm just finishing up my junior year in high school and have no business experience, other than being "Jr. Administrator" at a profitable free web hosting company.

The plan:
-First, just keep working on the game until I could reasonably call it complete.
-Promote it somehow, reach a certain amount of registered users (100? 500? 1,000? 100,000? ) and a few people running servers.
-Continue releasing updates to keep people interested
-Start working on an enhanced version with additional features (advanced building tools, ability to save files to my server, customizable character for multiplayer, maybe a "gear" system like Roblox)
-Release the premium version, charge a small fee for it ($15? $20?)
-Release more updates, make some of them for members that have paid only
-Hope people buy it!

The main problems I foresee are promoting the game (besides word of mouth and forums like this one, I have no idea how) and getting people to pay for the premium version.

Obviously, this is over a period of time--I have no plans on getting rich this year

Any comments or suggestions?

I once ruined a wireless keyboard with a bottle of water. A lot of the number keys, and some of the letters, were broken. I took it apart and carefully dried each sheet of plastic. Then I put it back together, and those keys worked again, but others were broken, including Escape and Left Ctrl. I bought the Microsoft Digital Media Keyboard, besides all of the hotkeys it feels much less "cheap" than my old one.

Try gimp. It does most of the talent for you. 

I've been using GIMP for 4 years, but I mainly do web/logo design with it. I'm horrible at pixel art or anything that resembles a humanoid or animal 

I mentioned this in my introduction thread, might as well post it here.


It's a cartoony adventure/action game I worked in 2007, tentatively titled Bounce's Adventures. You control a ball that seems to defy the laws of thermodynamics, trying to squish your enemies and escape to the next zone. In theory, anyway. Unlike some other stuff I have worked on, it was not ruined by lack of motivation, massive bugs, or running out of ideas: I made the mistake of using Python without learning OOP in Python, which means that the code quickly became an unmaintainable mess. I managed to add one moving object (a badly drawn mouse that lives in the sewer...) that didn't even affect the player before giving up.

I only finished the intro scene, so you get to fall down into the sewer and instead find a mysterious underground base which contains a teleporter to The Internet (never got to that part). It's more of a physics demo due to the lack of gameplay, and the horrible graphics (at the time I had only been using the GIMP for 1 year).

If the crap floating in the sewer seems a bit too elastic, that's because I was increasing the bounciness of it just for testing purposes. The physics have some minor bugs, and it's possible to get bouncing so fast across the level that you can't stop.

The physics are pretty cool though (slightly buggy), and the levels are all loaded from text files. Also, I was 14 at the time, and this was my second game ever, so considering that it's not as horrible.

Link: http://1scripts.net/bounce.zip

You need Python and Pygame to run it. I suggest not looking at the code though, it will make you want to kill me.

The LuaJava JNI library likes to randomly crash, bringing my whole progam down. I posted the crash logs on their mailing list, a moderator DELETED it. 

Did they give you a reason for deleting it?

I meant to say, they didn't approve it.

I know they haven't updated the software since 2007, I was just hoping they would leave it in case a helpful user wanted to reply.

@ Ludum Dare discussion

You should. But no, it's not necessary. Jacob, I remember you from the FSG forums a couple years back. You've been working at this thing forever. But yeah, definitely try out LD18 this August, it'll be very beneficial toward you proficiency as a programmer.

Hi Madk, I didn't know you posted here.

I really wanted to do LD17, but I had some stupid photography project to do. I'm definitely going to try the next one, after I improve my graphics skills a bit... right now I can't draw much at all, that's probably the main thing I need to work on.

The LuaJava JNI library likes to randomly crash, bringing my whole progam down. I posted the crash logs on their mailing list, a moderator DELETED it. 

The only alternative is Luaj, which doesn't follow the C API and has no documentation, so it almost impossible to figure out.

I've never remembered to properly introduce myself, but here you go!

My name is Jacob, as you might expect, I'm a student from Georgia in the US.

I'm not really a typical gamer; being a creative person, I prefer games where I can have some choices rather than follow a fixed storyline. My favorites are:

SimCity 2000 - It's from 1993, but to me, feels like a modern game except for the graphics. I grew up playing the Mac OS Classic version of it, just a few months ago I discovered it is now considered abandonware and can be downloaded for DOSBox.

Destruction was the best part:


SimTower - You build a 2D office building. It was pretty fun, but after a while of playing it about 1/2 of my tenants would randomly move out on one day, even though they were happy before. I never figured out if it was a bug or my bad playing skills.

Myst - Very cool puzzle game, Riven was even better.


Weekend Warrior, Cro-Mag Rally, and Bugdom - You've probably never heard of these, they are some old Pangea Software games for Mac OS 8/9 I played in elementary school.

Glider PRO - Another Mac game, too bad I came after its heyday.

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion - Self explanatory

4x4 EVO 2, Burnout Paradise - Besides adventure/sim games I also like racing games, these were my favorites. One of my favorite things about 4x4 EVO was that it was both moddable and multiplayer, something not found in most new racing games.

I found the game Minecraft last summer, it's very fun and inspired me to learn Java.

I've been doing web programming for 4 years, and real game programming for about 3 years (I made some games before that, but they were badly made and created using a visual editor). My first ever released game was another version of the Falling Sand Game called p5sand. It was crap, but taught me a lot about programming (I did it in Processing).

Later in 2007 I started making a pretty fun game tentatively called Bounce's Adventures--you controlled a bouncing ball in a 2D world. However, I made the mistake of using Python (what was I thinking?), even though I didn't know how to do OOP in Python, and eventually the code got so spaghetti-fied that it was nearly impossible to add new entities so I decided to give up. I might remake it someday in a better language.
I did save the character picture off the title screen: http://1scripts.net/pics/ball_title.png

In 2008 I worked on a lot of PHP scripts, none of them were games but it's helping me a lot with writing the server side part of Buildsim.

I also made another Falling Sand Game clone that year: http://1scripts.net/pics/sand/NextSand-1.2-win.zip (Windows .exe)

It was in C++, and a lot faster and better than my first one, but the FSG community had enough games and was starting to die, so it never really caught on.

Last year I decided to learn Java to compare it with C++. I liked it a lot better, and started writing a game called "Buildwars"--it was a game similar to Worms, but you could modify the landscape. I ended up losing interest though, but that game gave me the idea for Buildsim, which is my current project.

Tools work in character mode now, I already made him a jetpack

Tomorrow, I'm going to make a video detailing the new features (and trust me, it will be more interesting than a regular physics tech demo). Maybe it will create more interest... I'm trying to keep myself from losing motivation by keeping up with the success of similar projects like Phun, Roblox, Minecraft, and the Powder Toy, but that won't work forever.

Today, I worked on allowing you to save parts of scenes and import them into other scenes. I felt like overdoing it, so I added this as well.



It doesn't look like anything special. However, the category list, object list, and spawn point you see in the picture are all being dynamically downloading from the Buildsim website.  

Besides making it easier for me to add stock items for people to put in their scenes, if I ever make enough money to buy better web hosting I might allow users to share files on the server as well.

As you can see in the screenshot, I started working on tools too. Currently you can use the Equipped, MouseDown, and Unequipped events to make them interactive with Lua, but they don't work properly with characters yet.

The random crashes are much reduced, and it runs faster (on my computer, anyway)

Still working on this, trying to fix the physics bugs and lag. I had to rewrite a lot of the code since it had some threading issues.

Might have a multiplayer test next weekend or so, if everything goes well.

I know about the circles thing. Box2D doesn't have roll resistance, so it was either that or have them keep rolling infinitely... (the fixed rotation is disabled if you add joints to the circles)

I might experiment with changing the friction though.

Next update will be mostly "under the hood," I'm working on performance, and the physics crashes related to characters were actually symptoms of a more serious threading bug, which might take a while to fix. Apparently other people that use Box2D are having the same issue and nobody knows the cause for sure.

Chat works in the client now. I tried to run a test multiplayer server, and the lag and bugs were horrible... this will probably take a while, although the threading issue may be causing many of the multiplayer bugs.

EDIT: Do you think it is worth the effort to switch to Phys2d?

There must be a mistake somewhere, because the physics actually SUCK SO F*CKING MUCH right now. But i think there is really a bug for me, this really is abnormal.

If you hook a lot of stuff together with joints it gets buggy--Box2D doesn't have a weld joint, and the alternative, a revolute joint with the upper and lower limit set to 0, is not the best.

Networked physics are also bad, but the networking in the version I posted is not finished yet.

Got networking to work with players: http://i39.tinypic.com/25pnzth.jpg (big picture warning)

It's slowly turning into a game! (What you can play now is just the level editor, not the actual game.)

If everything goes well, I might put up a multiplayer test server next week.

I have a big problem with not being able to finish things.

Oh, dude, please please try to do the next ludum dare.  Please?

I've played the Ludum Dare entries before, I never thought about making one myself though.

Depending on the theme, I might be able to enter next time. If I am reading the site correctly, you don't have to sign up in advance?

Natural Evolution is the first game i feel i have done entirely myself which is to say my second game which is to say one that i have completely designed, programmed and drawn (yeah sorry the last part shows in the wrong way HHHEH)

It was made for my pal Frankie who pretty much introduced me to non-RPGMAKER-gamemaking, for his birthday last month

It's a game about aliens attacking earth because they always do that, so Frankie is all no way jorge i will kick your asses but frankie is but a human, so all the animals on the earth decide to help him and by help him i mean be his weapons so he can swing them at stuff
it features realistic evolution and currently only crustaceans, i guess i'll make the rest in expansion packs sold at fifty billion freebloons (like dubloons but invisible, shapeless and weightless)

i gave it to him last saturday (so three weeks late i am awesome)

I did the programming and Graphics but my pal Lurdiak did the sound effects and a sing-a-song and our netbuddy Chef Boyardee did the awesome chiptunes

so yeah i can't make menus worth a damn and interfaces can be wonky

screenshots are popular here but like i said i'm not crazy with graphics so this is all you get

http://www.mediafire.com/?jed1nwomdzy <-download link close to "pretty" picture

http://www.mediafire.com/?jed1nwomdzy <- another DL link for those who like being on bottom


WHAT IS IT YOU DO WELL THEN MR. MONSTER KING

i think i do fun not bad, you tell me!!!

oh yeah please include your score and current weapon with any feedback pleaasze

For such a funny concept, it's a fun game, and like others have said, even more impressive given the amount of time you spent making it. The graphics are pretty good too, I really like the centipedes in the beginning.