Fractal Block World

Acknowledgements

Back

The Team

Dan Hathaway: The creator.

Bruce Hathaway: Artwork.

Joan Hathaway: Artwork, troubleshooting, and business.

Tegan Pollak: Artwork.

Jon Brandvein: Ideas about software design and gameplay.


And of course...

Zach Barth: When we were juniors in college (at RPI), I had the pleasure of working with Zach (in 2007 I think) on a game he invented called Infinifrag 2. This was a multiplayer block based game with guns. I worked on the engine and developed the "Quad Algorithm", which is being used for rendering blocks in Fractal Block World. The game was never finished, but when Zach left RPI he created a similar game called Infiniminer. That game was the main inspiration for Minecraft.

I continued to work on my own version of an Infinifrag type game which I called Block Arena. Around 2012, I seriously started working on Fractal Block World.

I should thank Zach because if I had not started working on block based games with him at RPI, I would never have made this game.

If you are curious, here is where the idea for Fractal Block World came from: At RPI Zach and I were walking around the "86 Field" talking about Infinifrag and he asked if that game should have a level of detail system. I said that I thought it didn't make sense to have that in a block based game. But his comment stuck in my mind. Years later I was thinking about how in a world where most blocks are of a certain type, you only need to store the blocks that are not of that type. But how do we have efficient memory storage in a world where certain regions have their own default block type, but these types change from region to region? The idea for this game was a reasonable way to try to kill these two birds with one stone. Chunks from a distance are rendered as blocks, and chunks only store the blocks of non-default type (each chunk has a default child block type). It occured to me that this level of detail system would be perfect for a fractal. Also, either in 2012 or slightly before I had this wild dream which was basically like flying through the "Burlington" area in this game, shrinking and shrinking. When I woke up, I thought "let's do this thing", and I committed to writing the code.

Players: 2021

Clauvin Almeida found a bug in the secondary cannon projectile lua script.

Players: 2022

Martin Lengtat found several bugs in the map. Martin also found several bugs in the engine, including the game not working correctly when the game has been played for tens of hours (because the game time was stored as only a 32 bit floating point number, instead of a 64 bit number which is what it uses now).

Martin also had several suggestions as how to make the game itself better, including displaying when upgrades are maxed out and also the balancing of the weapons. Martin helped us decide that the homing weapon was too weak compared to other weapons, and also too weak in the early game. Martin had the idea to have the secondary fire of the cannon weapon have a "chain lightning" effect.

Pasha found a problem with text boxes and also an issue with saving and exiting. Pasha also found an issue with blocks being outside the boundary of their chunk.

Players: 2023

Martin Lengtat: also figured out how to play the game using an xbox controller. This is important for one day getting the game to work with VR. Note that we expect that if someone wanted to use VR, then it would be better to play in Genesis mode (no monsters).

Players: 2024

MarriedToMyChair made a very well thought out youtube video about this game. We took many of their suggestions. For more information, look in this website for the notes for update "1.01.16" (here).

The youtuber OrangE made an inspirational video here that talks about the history of this game and the thought process of exploring the world from the beginning. This video resulted in an explosion of popularity of the game. Thank you OrangeE!

OrangeE also made the first speedrun video here of the game, and he beat my time on Tranquility mode. Also here is a video where OrangeE plays the game on a hard mode.

The youtuber AverageCookie make a sequence of quite enjoyable videos about the game. Here is one of them.

Following OrangE's youtube video a discord server was formed and there has been an active discord community. Here are some of the members at the beginning who were helpful to the developer in terms of both speedrunning and modding:
Xenobeam
Iffyflux
Billie
Carbo Lemons
Hunt Moped
Kentrick Lamar
Hexyl
Dragoninja55
9th

There were also very many users on the discussions on Steam. One user that stands out is Fractalgem who answered many people's navigation questions.

On the discord there is a channel for reporting bugs and typos. Here are some of the users who reported such bugs and typos there:
Acamaeda, ADGOD, Altair5010, Alvi, Bizzy, Bee, Celina, Deek, Drachenbauer, Exqohai, E19_q, EnzoRak, FeltDoubloon250, Frostlith, GameWizard13, Golden, Honzik2607, HumanPerson, Huskies709, Juni, Ktosiek, Lilly, LxVer, Magnus, Mad-Cow, Pocket, Rat Nukem, Nesyn, Niko5927, Norman (^_^), Onedez, Onkel Jel, Silva, Tranquility, Wk, Yanzini, Yadifriend, Zaptrap.