Making Minecraft Spherical

Summary

Blocky Planet is a tech demo I created in the Unity game engine that attempts to map Minecraft’s cubic voxels onto a spherical planet. The planet is procedurally generated and fully destructible, allowing players to place or remove more than 20 different block types. While much of the implementation relies on common techniques you’d expect from your average Kirkland brand Minecraft clone, the spherical structure introduces a number of unique design considerations. This post will focus on these more novel challenges. FAQ How can I play it? The latest build is available for free on my Itch.io page here. While it’s optimized to run natively for Windows, there is a playable web build available to run in the browser (some jankiness may apply). Why did you make this? I was inspired by an old tech demo by Jordan Peck that I happened to stumble across. As someone who loves procedural geometry and voxel games, recreating it seemed like a fun challenge. There were also some missing features that I hoped to implement in my version (block textures, large-scale destruction, etc.). Are you going to make this into a full game? Probably not, or at least not to a level of polish I would feel comfortable charging for. Unfortunately working full time doesn’t leave much room for these side projects, and the amount of work to go from tech demo to finished product can be monumental. Though there’s a good chance I’ll push an update from time to time. How long did it take to make? It took me a little over a month to code, during which time I was able to dedicate about 15 hours per week. I did have previous experience with voxels, so the main challenge was just making it spherical. Ironically, it took over twice as long to write/illustrate this blog post. What did you use to make it? I built the project with Unity 6 using C#. While I made heavy use of Unity’s Job system and Burst compiler, I didn’t opt to go all in on DOTS. From my (admittedly limited) understanding, it seems like a signifi...