On Planetary Exploration

Not real planetary exploration, unfortunately, but a game to which I was introduced by a good friend. The game is called Planet Explorers and, though it's still in the alpha stage, it's already incredible.

Now, some background on me. If you've read a certain post on here, you'll know that I love Terraria. I love exploring, finding resources, obtaining said resources, and using them to make new things. I also the sense of openness even though there is a sort of progression line. Now, Terraria is a 2-dimensional game, of course. Minecraft was the closest analogue to Terraria in the realm of 3D games, but I just couldn't handle Minecraft. I didn't like the aesthetic, I didn't like the controls or the lack of structure, and I couldn't play it for very long.

Enter Planet Explorers. Like Minecraft, Planet Explorers uses voxels, which are basically 3D pixels, except that Planet Explorers' voxels aren't cubes. Take a look at this picture of the landscape

As you can see, there are no cubes in sight. Let me try and explain voxels. Most everyone understands pixels, which are basically little points of color on a 2D grid. Voxels are basically the same thing, but in 3D. If you imagine a sheet of graph paper where every junction between lines is a point in space, and each point can have a "color" or some other attribute, you basically get the idea. Voxel-based landscapes are nice because you can create overhangs and caves and things that are impossible using a heightmap. They're also nice for mining games like PE or Minecraft, because each separate voxel can be a different material, similar to Terraria's block structure. The difference between Minecraft and PE is how they handle connections between voxels. Let's go back to the graph paper example.

Assume that the different colored dots represent different materials. We have PE on the left and Minecraft on the right. In this first image there are no connections between voxels.

In this second image we have connected the voxels. In Minecraft on the right, connections can only be vertical or horizontal, whereas in PE the connections can be made at any angle. The engine calculates the slope based on the location of all adjacent voxels and fills it in. This leads to more natural-looking terrain, as can be seen in the in-game screenshot above.

So, the aesthetic is much more pleasing to me, just from the first impression. Gameplay is basically identical in a lot of ways. You move a character around a world, gathering resources, chopping down trees, digging up dirt and iron and other materials, building houses, crafting tools and weapons and armor and the like. However the experience in PE seems MUCH better than in Minecraft. For starters, there are NPCs that offer quests that help the player learn to play and use the interface. These quests feel as natural as a hidden tutorial can be, and generally fit into the setting, which is that of a spaceship full of explorers that crashes on an alien planet. It's often difficult to combine mouse and keyboard movement of a character with a point and click interface, but by binding rotation of the camera to the right mouse button, Planet Explorers manages to create a functional interface.

Now, not everything is perfect, of course. It's difficult to differentiate between materials, for starters. A lot of the stone and iron and limestone all looks more or less the same. As much as I hate the cube aesthetic of minecraft, it did make it easy to tell which  and often I would dig out a chunk of stuff without adding anything to my inventory. This seemed relatively arbitrary, but it might have been occurring when I dug up a section of a slope that wasn't large enough to be considered an entire voxel but instead was filling the empty space between adjacent points. I'm not sure.

Then again, this is an alpha, and the free download isn't the latest version of the alpha, either. I'm extraordinarily impressed with the quality of this game so far. In the 0.5 alpha version there are 3 gameplay versions: Story, Adventure, and Multiplayer. I've only tried the story mode, but from what I can gather the adventure and multiplayer modes are identical with the difference of the number of players. Adventure mode seems to be more sandbox-esque, where you have access to all crafting recipes and are free to just do whatever you want.

Another cool aspect of the game (which is quite unique, in my opinion) is the ability to generate your own custom crafting recipes. This utility plays similarly to a simplified 3D modelling program, where you basically sculpt a sword, gun, vehicle, or whatever you want. The program calculates the required materials, the weight, damage, etc of your final design, and then allows you to export it to the "real" world. It's a pretty fantastic aspect to add to the game, especially if people want to make a sword that spirals around and has tons of spikes sticking out at weird angles like I did. Eventually you can build complex vehicles with weaponry and everything. The interface takes a bit to learn, but once you've got it, it's quite powerful.

Bottom line: Planet Explorers looks and feels incredible already, and I've only tried the early alpha version. For $22 you can pick up the early access on Steam and get the 0.7 alpha which includes a lot of new features.

I'll leave you with this video. Enjoy!