FortressCraft is a video game released on the Xbox Live Indie game service on April 8th 2011.[1]
Within FortressCraft, the player may customize the randomly generated world terrain, consisting of textured cubes, either by themselves or with friends. The aim of the game is to build anything the player can think of and have fun doing so. FortressCraft has made over $2,000,000 USD rendering it one of the highest grossing Xbox Live Indie games of all time.[2]
The game takes its main inspiration from the game Dwarf Fortress, as well as the popular voxel games Minecraft and Infiniminer.
Early History
In early 2009, DjArcas started playing a game called Dwarf Fortress. Arcas was inspired by Dwarf Fortress and began to wonder if he could do a block-building game with high-definition graphics and an easy-to-use interface. A short while later, he started coding a game called 'Diggers', a 3D game similar to Dwarf Fortress. However, Arcas could not get the game to run well enough, and it was shelved.
When Minecraft was released, Arcas was impressed by the rendering system used in the game. He then realised that, by using a rendering system similar to Minecraft, he could revive the shelved 'Diggers' project.
Whilst browsing the Minecraft forums, Arcas became aware that fans of Minecraft were asking for the game to be ported to the Xbox 360. There were other people commenting that it would be impossible because of the lack of RAM on an Xbox. Arcas began to comment on one of the topics, stating that it was indeed possible to have a voxel game on the Xbox. To prove this, he took Diggers, made it into a very early version of FortressCraft, took an image of the game, and posted the image on the forum. The response to this was not what he had hoped, there were posts claiming that the image was faked. Undeterred, he then took a video recording of the game running on an Xbox with a mobile phone, posting it back on the forum. From that, he then started working on the game to make it into what would become FortressCraft.
Gameplay
FortressCraft has four game modes: Creative, Freeze Tag, The Hunt, Spleef mode and FPS mode. Creative mode is the only game mode available to the player until they find the relics necessary for the other game modes; or the player uses console commandsto launch FPS mode. If a player joins a world with any of the other game modes active without owning the relics themselves, the player will still be able to play. In creative mode, the player spawns in a randomly generated block world inside a water-filled tower made of reinforced rock. They have access to all of the blocks in the game to customize their world. The player can also choose to find relics, which give the player abilities or access to the game modes. There is a world ranking system where other players can join a players world and 'like' it. Accumulating 'likes' unlocks server rewards, special items which the player can hold in other worlds to show their world is popular. Using the workshop in creative allows players to create up to 64 custom blocks and utilize them throughout their world. It should be noted that custom blocks are treated as being one block high, no matter their actual size.
Onlive
The game is currently being ported to the OnLive game system. This version will feature much larger draw distances, higher custom block counts (estimated 25,000+) and touch screen support.
Sales
FortressCraft is one of the highest grossing Xbox Live Indie games of all time, having made over $2 million and selling over 800,000 copies. In addition to this, on FortressCraft's release day, it ranked #1 in terms of sales in Canada, #2 in the UK, and #3 in the US. The game has an 84% conversion rate of trials to purchases. [3]
Reception
FortressCraft was met with mixed reviews from fans. While player reviews are generally positive, it received criticism from the Minecraft fanbase, calling it a “rip off”. With 4.5/5 stars from Xbox.com, and a 6.0 user rating from gamespot.com.
At the beginning of 2012, it was listed as one of 2011's top indie games. [4]
Box Arts
Through its development, FortressCraft has had several different box art iterations:
