Edit: I just wanted to preface this by saying I think this is a very cool demonstration and a great first step towards a game: I should've made that clearer in the rest of my comment which continues below.
The state of the demo is about where Notch was about this time in 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k
I point that out because every month or so someone creates a "voxel"-based terrain generator with basic building and gets branded a "Minecraft clone", as if that's all there is to one of the most abnormally successful indie games of all time.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot more than that just that to make something that's actually fun to play and is comparable to even Minecraft in its pre-alpha incarnations.
And if his success wasn't enough, Notch was comparatively fast at developing Minecraft (at least initially). Within a couple of weeks of the video I linked above, he had water and multiplayer working[1]. Nevertheless, it still took another 2.5 years to get to a 1.0 product, and Mojang is still hacking away at it. Skycraft, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have changed at all since it was last featured on HN[1] two weeks ago.
I don't mean to be a negative Nancy about it: I think it's great to mess around with this stuff and if playing around with a basic Minecraft/Lego-esque builder scratches a gamedev itch for you, that's awesome.
But it seems really premature to start asking for money for it[2], even as a "Kickstarter"-type pledge drive: I'm not sure I'd even consider this a MVP or proof-of-concept yet. Skycraft today is, relatively speaking, the easy part, and really more of a technical demo: there's no game here yet.
Best of luck to the developer, though: I'd love to see if they stick with it and make something really cool. The other ones I've seen all seem to die off shortly after being featured.
[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEAHqgZU-0o
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738984
[2]: http://skycraft.io/#buy
The state of the demo is about where Notch was about this time in 2009: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k
I point that out because every month or so someone creates a "voxel"-based terrain generator with basic building and gets branded a "Minecraft clone", as if that's all there is to one of the most abnormally successful indie games of all time.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot more than that just that to make something that's actually fun to play and is comparable to even Minecraft in its pre-alpha incarnations.
And if his success wasn't enough, Notch was comparatively fast at developing Minecraft (at least initially). Within a couple of weeks of the video I linked above, he had water and multiplayer working[1]. Nevertheless, it still took another 2.5 years to get to a 1.0 product, and Mojang is still hacking away at it. Skycraft, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have changed at all since it was last featured on HN[1] two weeks ago.
I don't mean to be a negative Nancy about it: I think it's great to mess around with this stuff and if playing around with a basic Minecraft/Lego-esque builder scratches a gamedev itch for you, that's awesome.
But it seems really premature to start asking for money for it[2], even as a "Kickstarter"-type pledge drive: I'm not sure I'd even consider this a MVP or proof-of-concept yet. Skycraft today is, relatively speaking, the easy part, and really more of a technical demo: there's no game here yet.
Best of luck to the developer, though: I'd love to see if they stick with it and make something really cool. The other ones I've seen all seem to die off shortly after being featured.
[1]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEAHqgZU-0o
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5738984
[2]: http://skycraft.io/#buy