Minecraft worlds are generated on an almost infinite flat plane, meaning players do not have to deal with the curvature of the world they’re building; they cannot traverse the surface of their planet and return to their starting position. However, one software developer by the name of Bowerbyte decided to level it up by making Blocky Planet. It’s not a full-on game yet, with the maker calling it a tech demo, but you can download and install the title on your PC or play Blocky Planet through your browser.
Bowerbyte says that the biggest challenge with creating the demo was converting the flat Minecraft world into a planet. It’s easy enough to build a sphere out of blocks (cubic voxels to be specific) by filtering the centers of these items that are within a specific distance from a point across all three axes. However, even though that will give you a blocky ball, you won’t be able to recreate gravity. This will cause problems whenever you build upward or dig downward.
So, they’re faced with two problems. First, they needed to map a 2D grid onto a 3D sphere (like mapping a flat map to a globe), and then they needed to keep the block size consistent as you move from the surface of the planet to its core (or vice versa). The solution to the first issue is to break the flat surface into six equal pieces and then map them onto a cube. They then further break down each of the faces of the cube into smaller squares, and then the corner of each shape is pushed out to a specific distance from a central point. Bowerbyte likened this procedure to “inflating the cube like you would a balloon.”
The squares are now distorted to follow the shape of the planet, so they’re now referred to as quads. Since changing the shapes of anything will result in distortion, the dev said that they pre-distorted their square grid, which helped the final output look normal.
The next issue they had to solve was with depth. As you go deeper and closer to the center, the blocks will become thinner and thinner, eventually turning into a triangle. They first tried to remedy this by adding more blocks as you go higher, but it would often result in misaligned layers. To solve this, Bowerbyte decided to only add more blocks when the distortion becomes too obvious and then increase it by a whole number to make it easier to align the blocks across different layers. They also grouped multiple layers into shells, making them easier to process.
These were the biggest challenges that Bowerbyte had to overcome to develop the demo. After this, they added the gravity mechanic, where they created their own system that focuses the gravity on the central point of the planet instead of just downward, similar to Minecraft. That way, the player would not “fall off” the side of the planet but instead stay planted on the surface even if they traverse all of its sides.
The dev said that they built this demo during their free time, and that they intend to do more work on it in the future. However, they have no intention of turning it into a full game, as doing so can be quite time-consuming and will compete with the time they need for their real job. Still, Block Planet is an interesting diversion from Minecraft that will give you a more realistic surface resembling that of a planet, instead of a flat, expansive world.
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