Haven't read through the entire topic so I'm not sure if these have been brought up, but some nice things to see:
- World-based design as opposed to "saves". Gives a lot more continuity to maps, works well with a terrain generation system. Somewhat ripped from Minecraft, but it works very well for sandbox games. Loading/Saving maps could still work but I feel like it somewhat breaks immersion and shows a lot of barebone elements of how the game works.
- Chunk saving and dynamic loading. Blockland's octree is technically chunk based I suppose, but this is a much better design system overall optimizing rendering, netcode, and real-time saving.
- Asset based building. Being able to place pre-built multi-brick components. This is what I want to pursue in Blockland still, but support for something like this from the start would be amazing. Instead of downloading brick packs, you can download someone's "City Pack" and suddenly be able to place benchs, lamp posts, etc. as pre-constructed elements. It makes large builds much more attainable.
- Scratch-like eventing system. Eventing is important in Blockland but does have a bit of a learning curve to it. Making something more visual and similar to scratch has a much softer learning curve and you can do some neat stuff with it that is complicated with events, like inherit variable support, conditionals, loops, etc.
All of this (except the events) sounds like that one Lego game that was released on steam and then everyone forgot about it.
Anyway, I much prefer Blockland's save/load system and static maps. Sure, a map generator could be included as an extra thing, but I think we should stay away from the "worlds" concept.
Also if you're going to have easy-bake scripting, there has to be an option to just type the stuff in instead, otherwise it becomes a chore.
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