Axistential

Who are you?
My name is Samuel Bock, I'm a programmer. I drink a lot of highly caffeinated tea and make video games.
Is this a minecraft clone?
That is not the intention. Minecraft is an inspiration, and many of the gameplay mechanics originate in Minecraft. The idea behind Axistential, however, is to take these ideas in a different direction. If you are looking for Minecraft, you can find it here. It is a very good game and I suggest that you play it. There is also an open source clone called Manic Digger which is available here. I have not played it, but it is by all accounts quite impressive.
How is this not like Minecraft then?
There are features that Axistential has that Minecraft does not (like flight and grappling hooks), and features that Minecraft has that Axistential currently lacks (monsters, liquids, sound, etc), but the bigger differences are in the focus of the game. Here, more emphasis is being placed (or will be placed in the future) on exploration and freeform building. In time the goal is to have hundreds of different island types to find and explore/loot/destroy and a building system that allows you freedom on the level of Garry's Mod.
Are you going to open source this?
I couldn't say for sure right now. I would love to somehow find a way to support myself making this game, by donations from generous internet people or some other currently unknown means. If, however, I stop developing it, or some excellent game company here in the northwest offers me a job, I will gladly release the source.
What did you use to make this?
The game is written almost entirely in C++. It uses zlib for compression, libpng for image loading, bullet for physics, glfw for the windows backend, lua for scripting, GLEW for OpenGL extension handling, and boost for threading and filesystem acccess. Graphics are done straight in OpenGL, and the GUI is home brewed.