Demiurge :: Introduction

Demiurge is a video game project based on a voxel engine made from scratch in C++, with SDL 2 and OpenGL. My goal is to build a game mainly inspired by Minecraft, with its own aesthetic and its own universe. Demiurge does not have the ambition to become a commercial product intended for the public, but can still be downloaded for people who would like to play it. This project is in response to a desire to emancipate my modded Minecraft private server from Mojang's game and be able to have full control over the features, bugs, performance and the universe itself of what a friend and I are doing there.

Origin of Demiurge :

Demiurge is a project that started in 2011, when I wanted to create my own game inspired by Minecraft. Originally, I wanted to offer a different universe, and add features that I had trouble finding with Minecraft mods. I created the first prototype of the game in C++, with SFML and OpenGL. The engine was therefore totally designed by me from scratch. At the time, I still needed to improve my way of programming, and so the project quickly became a gas plant. I found it increasingly difficult to advance in the game due to a lack of methodology, and health problems. I kept jotting down features that I dreamed of including in the project, then I finally stopped working on it. In addition to Minecraft, the game was also inspired by Diablo, or even Starmade. The prototype worked very well and only suffered from a buggy home-made physics engine that sometimes crashed the game.

A few years later, I tried to revive the project. I added some features like a shader that can warp the flat, cubed world into a round planet shape, and tools to help me visually spot bugs, and use commands. Faced with my difficulties in recreating an engine from scratch, with the rule of better structuring the project and avoiding reproducing the errors of the first prototype, I decided in 2017 to divide the project into three parts. First, develop many elements of the game in a simplified version, in 2D and in top view, in Demiurge Mini. The depth of the world was limited to 5 levels to dig and build, in a game similar to games such as RimWorld. Then, Demiurge 2D which was to offer more depth of the world, using the isometric view, in the style of games like Rollercoaster Tycoon. Finally, on the strength of the experience acquired and the proven code, develop Demiurge 3D in the best conditions. This process finally appeared to me not very motivating, and it therefore did not solve my problems.

Demiurge mini in June 2017. The game was 2D and moved quite fast.

The new Demiurge :

After playing a lot, for years, on my modded Minecraft private server, and having fun imagining all kinds of constructions, interest in Demiurge gradually returned. Having as a project to create a metaverse with MetaWorlds, I asked myself the question of whether I should start from scratch, or if I could not do otherwise. I looked at Minetest, which isn't a game I'm very happy with, but which has the merit of being open-source and in C++. In this year 2022, I first decided to start from Minetest's code to create Demiurge. I recently compiled the game code and did a quick test. And I started studying the Minetest code, which you can find on this website. I quickly tried to modify this source code to create Demiurge. But, at the beginning of July, when I wanted to change the hand of the first person view, I realized that in Minetest, the latter is in extruded 2D. Hmm...

Finally, fork Minetest seemed inefficient to me. I'm still not totally sure that redoing Demiurge from scratch with my own code is the best decision, knowing that I've never been a fan of ready-to-use engines like Unity or Unreal Engine for example. It was while talking about the source codes of open-source projects on Mastodon, that I wanted to share old Demiurge videos published on my Youtube channel. By reviewing them, some made me feel this passion and this satisfaction that the development from scratch of Demiurge gave me, despite my anxiety and depression at the time. Memories came back to my mind and it was really at that moment that I felt sure of myself on my decision to relaunch this project from scratch.

• Demiurge is mainly inspired by Minecraft and several of its mods, 7 Days to Die, Starmade and Diablo. The game will be free software and the source code, as well as documentation on its inner workings, will be accessible. It is entirely coded from scratch in C++ with SDL 2 and OpenGL 3.
• Graphics will be semi-realistic and medium to high resolution depending on the configuration chosen.
• The monsters will be scary and varied for each type. The game will be part of the horror genre, but not only. It is an aspect of his identity.
• Demiurge will be an elaborate voxel engine offering small cubes to create detail, but also positionable slopes in all directions, like the Little Tiles mod in Minecraft and 7 Days to Die for the shapes available in the build interface.
• It will be possible to overcome the global cubic grid of the world to build in different angles. Using a system of grids independent of each other, but able to communicate the position of the player, it will be possible to build buildings not aligned with their neighbors, or diagonal roads.
• Demiurge's space will be non-enclidian. It will be possible to build a completely normal world, but also to integrate spatial anomalies such as corridors crossing other spaces without ever interfering with them, or creating spaces larger than what contains them (like the Tardis ;) ).

Example of non-Euclidean space - video by CodeParade.
• The world will be made up of layers. Each stratum will have its biomes. We can find a hell, an underworld, a surface, a paradise, or whatever comes to mind. Also, each world is a planet that it will be possible to leave to explore others, or build space stations.
• The world, though made of a cubic grid, will be a sphere. Mathematically, it is not possible to make a sphere directly with a space made up of cubes. If we try to do this, you'll inevitably have deformed cubes at certain areas of the sphere. Yet I have managed to do such a phenomenon in the past using an equation that produces an illusion of roundness on cubic space, with no visible distortion. The only deformation is temporal, since when you move diagonally on the map, you necessarily travel a greater distance than if you moved on an axis. But, I have an idea to solve this problem that I will explain on a dedicated page ;)
• More ideas may be added here in the future :)

You can follow me on Neocities to read more later :D