Its just a fun short story. In a distant, lonely meadow planet, a human woman wearily stands up after having fainted for a full night. Her back hurts deeply, as she fashions a walking stick from a loose piece of wood from the cave she has just exited from earlier. As she carefully wanders the meadow, vague recollections of a past life travel through her mind. Indeed, she was a Terran, from the Sol System. A prestigious ship captain who traveled the stars. However, all she can remember was the night she fell to sleep in her ship... And now she can no longer dream in this strange world. Eventually as those thoughts ruminate through her conscious, she finds a simple house, built from wooden planks and clay tiling. As she approaches it, she slowly opens the door, as an old man exits a nearby kitchen, with a hot mug of tea. "Ah- A visitor. I... Never expected to see a Gestalt finally arrive." He softly speaks, taking a sip from his morning drink.

Planets are the core of Blocktest. By utilizing a ship, you can explore any planet so long as its within distance of the player, and they have sufficient fuel to make the journey. Environment Each planet will not be cut of the same cloth. While all will use some sort of terrain generation, the ores, biomes and overall climate will be extremely different depending on which one you land. Planets depending on their environment may force the player to change tactics and utilize unique equipment to brave the challenges ahead. A cold, frozen planet for instance would require a player to wear winter equipment, that has less defensive stats against normal attacks, but shields the player from the biting cold of the planet. Occasionally having protective equipment may be insufficient. Some weaponry may be completely ineffective depending on the environment they find themselves in. One would not be able to use ballistic weapons on a water planet due to how bullets travel on water, and may instead have to resort to laser weaponry to get by. Setpieces

The basis of blocktest is a whimsical universe spawned from the collective unconsciousness (dreams, specifically) of a near infinite population of sophonts spread out through the general, seemingly infinite multiverse. Have you ever dreamed exploring some meadow in your head? Maybe some desolate, cold planet... Or the suffocatingly hot stove that is a magmatic planet? Those dreams were real. In a sense, at least. From the depths of your subconscious, you were able to form an avatar of yourself, a mirror that only vaguely remembers the original. However, like all dreams, they come to an end, and the connection between the dreamer and the dreamt forever severed. Your dreamt up avatar is now given the opportunity to explore this vast world, and find their place upon it. Core Themes The main theme of the game is exploring the phenomena often seen in sandbox games, and it is the question of "How do you find meaning in a supposedly meaningless world?"This should provide the basis for many of the things seen in a setting, particularly the philosophy of different factions, and how they in particular find their meaning in this universe where their own origin is so certain. It would also encourage the player to find their own subjective meaning in the world as well. Maybe they want to be some pirate who raids settlements wantonly and has fun while doing it, or perhaps they're a builder who likes constructing beautiful colonies for people to live in. Whatever it is, the player should ideally find the meaning they want in the world and be happy living in it. There should also be no racial divide between the populations. Since this is a world spawned from the collective unconscious, homeworlds do not, and will not exist in this reality. There are congregations and groups of people, but the distinction is done in the philosophical and moral level, not at the racial level.

Combat is an important component of a 2D action survival game. The combat should also tie in some capacity to the main loop. The Preparation Before headed to combat, the player must consider the resources they have prior to an encounter. Ammunition as a scarce resource is an important factor to consider to make encounters more interesting, and give a good balance for melee weapons. On the one hand, guns have range and allow you to kill from a distance, but are noisy, and can attract attention, as well as having limited use by virtue of ammunition being limited. Melee weapons are closer, giving an inherent risk to making an approach, in exchange for being rather silent, and not costing any ammunition to use. Movement and Defense The movement itself when in combat should also feel worthwhile. Taking an example from Terraria, PVP and PVE are at its best when you have movement options to dodge the multitude of attacks that an enemy can dish out against you. This feeling should be present in any encounter. One can take a tanky approach by having shields and thicker armor, in exchange for poor movement speed, or opt for a glass cannon approach, with lighter equipment but lightning-fast movement speed. Weaponry Weaponry should be varied whenever possible. Melee weapons having the options of daggers, spears, swords and axes are all staples and beloved by all. Guns should also be equally as varied. Utilizing Wordtest as the example of the setting, energy weapons, gauss weapons, ballistics, rocket-propelled weaponry should all be options, at the cost of rarity and complexity.

Colonies are settlements in space which have NPCs to talk and trade or otherwise do business with. At a colony, the player is able to exchange or use their resources to obtain better equipment. Something I want to try and avoid is the feeling of the player character as

Put the things we need to have done/fleshed out for the v1.0 drop in this list. Vaguely ordered by importance/priority. [ ] Functional Survival Mode [ ] Crafting System [ ] Character Creation and Customization [ ] Multiplayer [ ] Multiple Races with Unique Racial Abilities [ ] Lighting System [ ] Day/Night Cycle [ ] Background Parallax

All ideas presented in this document must be compatible with the following statement: Blocktest is a sandbox exploration game focusing on in-depth player mechanics. The Exploration-Base Building Loop Analyzing other sandbox adventure survival games reveals the "Exploration-Base Building Loop", a central gameplay loop that revolves around exploring to collect materials to build a base to make further exploration easier. This is present in Minceraft, in Terraria, in Don't Starve, and even in Starbound, though all differ in the particulars of the implementation and the mechanisms used to encourage shifting phases. The Exploration Phase Player travels through space to arrive at a destination (a planet or moon or asteroid field or space station, etc.) After the player has arrived at destination, they can do things such as mining or exploring the world. Setpieces placed throughout the world offer valuable rewards and unique locales to explore.

Tools are another staple of sandbox games and are usually used to break things in the world or to do more unusual interactions (like tilling dirt). Some games, such as Starbound, have a singular all-tool that is used to do most basic functions. Tools, as of the time of writing this document, have not yet been implemented in Blocktest's Indev. This document will cover a potential design path for how tools will be handled. Tools in Blocktest All tools will have two basic stats: Tool Power and Durability. The concept of Tool Power is borrowed directly from Terraria as an abstract measure of how good a tool is. The higher the tool power, the faster it will break blocks, and the better the ores it can mine. Durability is the measure of how much a tool can do before it breaks. Some tools are better at breaking certain kinds of blocks than other tools, e.g. an axe can break wooden blocks better than a pickaxe can, a shovel can break soft blocks better than an axe could. (Having this as a feature may be unnecessary and redundant.) Basic Controls This will depend on what Mark will want to do with the controls in the future, but here are a few possible options.

tldr: hexagons are the bestagons Crafting is an integral part of many sandbox games. The premise is simple: put two or more things together and make a more complicated thing. In most games, it's implemented so that there is set crafting recipes that require exact amounts of exact materials, with few, if any, substitutes accepted for certain crafts, which will always result in the same outcome with little, if any, variance. Crafting in Other Games Minecraft Crafting is done with the use of an interactive 2x2 grid. More recipes are available with the use of a Crafting Table, which has a more permissive 3x3 grid. Recipes call for exact materials with little variance permitted (blackstone can substitute cobblestone in stone tool crafting, all kinds of wood can be used for wood crafts, etc.) Results do not vary. Terraria Crafting is done with a scrolling menu available in the inventory screen, with available recipes modified by proximity to crafting stations. Recipes allow minor variance in the cases of things like recipes that call for wood (all variants of wood are allowed to be used.) Results can vary slightly when crafting tools, weapons, or accessories in the form of reforges.

Building is a core component of almost all sandbox survival games. Hell, I'm struggling trying to come up with one that doesn't utilize it in some form. The point is, we ought to think out how we want building to work, even if it's the most intuitive and simple system out there. Current Implementation Left click to place blocks, Right click to place them in the background. Press E to toggle between building and destruction. This approach is simple and intuitive, which is exactly what we want for building. Potential Additions? Because of how simple the basics of building are at its core, we have plenty of room for expansion. Here are a few ideas: