Mine

One of the projects for my graphics class this semester was to make a simple Minecraft clone, which I worked on with Steph Cheng. Crafting wasn’t a required feature¹, so I called it just “Mine.” You can play it online here.

Here are the controls²:

• wasd: Move around
• qe: Cycle through inventory
• r: Reset game
• f: Change screen size
• p: Toggle profiler

Click the screen so that the game can capture the pointer. After that, clicking and holding with the pickaxe selected mines blocks, and clicking with a block selected in the inventory results in placing that block.

Since there is no crafting, you instead get points for mining ore or tree leaves. The higher your score is, the faster you can mine stuff. There is set objective in the game.

I am interested in going further with this and making a Minecraft clone that has better game design, but I don’t think I’ll reuse the code from this project for a few reasons:

• The code is pretty messy since the entire thing had to be made over the course of two weeks.
• The starter code isn’t mine and I don’t really know how it works.
• JavaScript and TypeScript are not performant at all. Using Rust and WebAssembly is a much better option. Also, I don’t understand why web dev nerds on YouTube love TypeScript so much. It’s not that much better that plain JavaScript.

I also wouldn’t copy the premise of Minecraft exactly. Games centered around resource extraction and building have been done to death.

13 April 2023

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