The Blockheads (video game)

Last updated

The Blockheads
TheBlockheads cover.png
Developer(s) Majic Jungle Software NoodleCake Studios
Publisher(s) Majic Jungle Software NoodleCake Studios (for android)
Composer(s) Kevin MacLeod
Platform(s) iOS, Android (Defunct)
ReleaseiOS: January 10, 2013
Android: September 24, 2013 (Defunct)
Genre(s) Adventure, survival
Mode(s) Single-player, multiplayer

The Blockheads is a survival sandbox indie mobile game created by David Frampton, an indie developer and owner of Majic Jungle Software, a studio based in New Zealand.

Contents

Gameplay

The Blockheads is a 2.5D survival sandbox game. The players control a customizable "Blockhead" avatar and can explore their surroundings, navigate through the world map, harvest materials to create structures, and craft more advanced tools and materials in the game.

Aggressive and passive creatures exist on land, underground, and in bodies of water. These include sharks, dodos, scorpions, drop bears, and fellow Blockheads. The game features a player versus player option that enables players to attack one another in multiplayer mode.

Multiplayer can be accessed over Wi-Fi, with worlds hosted over LAN, Game Center, or cloud servers, with the latter two only being available on iOS. Since version 1.7, servers are paid for with in-app purchases and the game center option was removed. [1] [2]

The game can also be hosted via an app for Mac users, although the availability of the world solely depends on the online status of the host. [3] The player can 'warp' a Blockhead through a portal, randomly generating a finite world of multiple sizes ranging from 1/16-16x that loops back to the portal.

The Blockheads have five statistics: health, happiness, hunger, energy, and environment, accessible from the in-game menu. The hunger and energy bars will constantly decrease in most cases. The Blockhead must eat food to prevent the hunger bar from entirely depleting, otherwise the health bar will deplete due to starvation. When the energy bar is depleted, the Blockhead will walk slower and 'collapse from exhaustion'. The energy bar can be gradually filled by sleeping in a bed or on the ground, or it can be filled instantly by consuming caffeinated items like coffee.

The player must craft items to progress in the game. Crafting takes a certain amount of time, in or out of game, but this waiting process can be bypassed by using time crystals. Time crystals can be gained by watching short advertisements, mining them in caves, or through in-app purchases. Players can also purchase double-time, a feature speeding up crafting times by twice the speed and cuts the time crystal costs in half.[ verification needed ]

After version 1.7, players can create single player worlds or servers with custom options, such as custom health values, how the world is generated, custom sun colors, and even customizing the items Blockheads spawn with. Version 1.7 also included a new game mode called “expert mode.”

The Blockheads contains in-app purchases including the aforementioned double-time and time crystals, which can be used to craft items, make and/or support online servers, and do actions faster in the game. Players can also get time crystals through watching in-game advertisements. HD graphics used to be paid and added in hand drawn icons to the interface. With the 1.7 update, it was made free, but can be turned off in settings. [4]

Reception

Rickey Ainsworth of TouchArcade said that it is another one of many two-dimensional versions of Minecraft , the game they based it on, but their game features many twists and turns that make the game exciting. [5] Metacritic, based on 7 reviews and 6 ratings, gives the game a 5/10 score. [6]

Other

The Blockheads has an official website and a forum run on Discourse and previously vBulletin. On March 10, 2022, it was announced that the forum would be permanently put into a read-only state, which occurred on April 11, 2022. [7]

The game has received over 10 million official downloads. It has been noted that the game has largely been overrun by script kiddies, and a small portion of the player base has been overtaken by role-play, online dating, and sexual content.

In January 2021, the app was removed from the Google Play Store without comment from its publisher, Noodlecake Studios. The Blockheads Community Manager would later confirm that the game was removed from the Google Play Store by Noodlecake Studios themselves due to failed negotiations with Google to circumvent certain requirements of modern Android versions. [8]

On August 22, 2022, David Frampton announced that he would be shutting down the online services that hosted cloud servers due to "low player numbers" and a significant lack of maintenance. In his announcement, Frampton clarified that players would have the ability to download their cloud worlds and also mentioned that the shutdown would take some time. Along with claiming that he had no plans to remove The Blockheads from the App Store, Frampton also noted that Mac servers would not be affected by the shutdown. [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SharePoint</span> Web application platform

SharePoint is a web-based collaborative platform that integrates natively with Microsoft 365. Launched in 2001, SharePoint is primarily sold as a document management and storage system, although it is also used for sharing information through an intranet, implementing internal applications, and for implementing business processes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AppJet</span> Company

AppJet, Inc. was a website that allowed users to create web-based applications on a client web browser. AppJet was founded by three MIT graduates, two of whom were engineers at Google, before starting AppJet. They launched their initial public beta on December 12, 2007, allowing anyone to create a web app.

<i>Earthrise</i> (video game) 2011 video game

Earthrise is a science fiction player vs player massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) by independent Bulgarian developer Masthead Studios released in February 2011.

<i>Mortal Online</i> 2010 video game

Mortal Online is a first-person, open-world, PvP/PvE sandbox MMORPG developed and published by the Swedish independent video game company Star Vault. Mortal Online was released on June 9, 2010. The game is inspired by the desire to return to Ultima Online's player-controlled, sandbox-style game design; it uses Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3 and features a skill-based, real-time combat system.

Turbo is a set of software products and services developed by the Code Systems Corporation for application virtualization, portable application creation, and digital distribution. Code Systems Corporation is an American corporation headquartered in Seattle, Washington, and is best known for its Turbo products that include Browser Sandbox, Turbo Studio, TurboServer, and Turbo.

<i>Blue Mars</i> (video game) 2009 video game

Blue Mars, a 3D massively multiplayer virtual world platform developed by Hawaii-based Avatar Reality, allows 3rd parties to create virtual worlds, MMOG games, simulations, shops, businesses, entertainment venues, clothing, custom avatars, furniture, virtual homes, and other items. It consists of four main parts: the client software, the Sandbox Editor SDK suite, the website, and the host servers. It is often compared to Second Life, since both are virtual social worlds allowing user-created content. According to Jim Sink, CEO of Avatar Reality, "Blue Mars was inspired by a vision of the future when the power to terraform whole worlds is within our grasp. The name Blue Mars represents possibility and hope."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Battle.net</span> Online gaming platform by Blizzard Entertainment

Battle.net is an Internet-based online game, social networking service, digital distribution, and digital rights management platform developed by Blizzard Entertainment. The service was launched on December 31, 1996, followed a few days later with the release of Blizzard's action-role-playing video game Diablo on January 3, 1997. Battle.net was officially renamed to "Blizzard Battle.net" in August 2017, with the change being reverted in January 2021.

Evochron Legends is an online science fiction game developed and published by Starwraith 3D Games for Microsoft Windows. It was released on February 5, 2009.

<i>Minecraft</i> 2011 video game

Minecraft is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios and originally released in 2009. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being fully released in November 2011, with Notch stepping down and Jens "Jeb" Bergensten taking over development. Minecraft has become the best-selling video game in history, with over 300 million copies sold and nearly 140 million monthly active players as of 2023. It has been ported to several platforms.

<i>Project Zomboid</i> Open world survival horror game

Project Zomboid is an open-world, isometric video game developed by British and Canadian independent developer The Indie Stone. The game is set in the post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested exclusion zone of the fictional Knox Country, Kentucky, United States, where the player is challenged to survive for as long as possible before inevitably dying. It was one of the first five games released on the alpha funding section of the gaming portal Desura.

<i>7 Days to Die</i> 2013 video game

7 Days to Die is a survival horror video game set in an open world developed by The Fun Pimps. It was released through Early Access on Steam for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X on December 13, 2013, and for Linux on November 22, 2014. Versions for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One were released in 2016 through Telltale Publishing, but are no longer being developed. In late 2022, The Fun Pimps announced that the game will be re-released on consoles targeting Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5. It is also available on Xbox One via Game Pass, but still unknown if it will return on PlayStation 4.

<i>StarMade</i> 2012 video game

StarMade is an effectively infinite open-universe space simulation sandbox game in development by Schine for Windows, macOS, and Linux. StarMade is currently in alpha and is free to play, during alpha.

<i>Nether</i> (video game) 2013 video game

Nether is a first-person multiplayer survival game for Windows. It was developed by American studio Phosphor Games, and was first available on October 29, 2013. Nether became popular in late 2013, when many YouTubers such as Markiplier were uploading videos of them playing the game. Nether has often been compared to other similar sandbox survival games such as 7 Days to Die and Rust.

<i>Albion Online</i> Medieval fantasy MMORPG video game

Albion Online (AO) is a free medieval fantasy MMORPG by Sandbox Interactive.

A Minecraft mod is an independent, user-made modification to the open world sandbox game Minecraft. There are many of these mods, and users are able to download them from the Internet, for the most part for free. Utilizing additional software, several mods can be used at the same time in order to improve the gameplay.

<i>Astroneer</i> 2019 video game

Astroneer, officially stylized in all caps, is a sandbox adventure game developed from independent developer System Era Softworks. The game was released through early access in December 2016 before a full release on December 16, 2019. The player is tasked with colonizing planets, creating structures, and collecting resources. The character is called an Astroneer and the player can travel to planets to activate cores and complete the game. There are often rewards given to the player upon completion of core activation, most notably a suit and/or visor.

<i>Survivalcraft</i> Sandbox video game

Survivalcraft is a 2011 open sandbox video game developed by Marcin Igor Kalicinski under the brand Candy Rufus Games. Following early test versions, it was released on 16 November 2011 for the Windows Phone, and is also available for Android, iOS, and Microsoft Windows. The game is set on a deserted island in an open world, where the player collects resources and items that can be made into survival tools. The game has six different game modes: Survival, Challenging, Cruel, Harmless, Adventure, and Creative. of which the first four involve the player gathering necessary resources to stay alive. The Creative mode gives the player unlimited items and health, and the Adventure mode is used for quest maps and parkours.

<i>Minetest</i> 2010 open source video game

Minetest is a free and open-source game creation system with focus on voxel graphics. It is written primarily in C++ and makes use of the Irrlicht Engine. Minetest provides an API for users to write their own games and mods written in Lua. It is cross-platform, being available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux, some BSD descendants, some GNU variants and Android.

<i>Scrap Mechanic</i> 2016 video game

Scrap Mechanic is a sandbox video game developed for Windows by Swedish game studio and publisher Axolot Games, in which players can build machines, vehicles, and buildings, and share their creations online. The initial version of the game, released on January 20, 2016, was a creative mode with unlimited access to all available parts for building. On the day of its release, it was the top-selling game on Steam and is estimated to have 1–2 million sales. The survival mode update for the game, with new game mechanics including wildlife, scavenging, farming, and cooking, as well as an underwater biome, was released on May 7, 2020. It was the third-best-selling game on Steam the week after the update.

<i>Core Keeper</i> 2022 video game

Core Keeper is a survival sandbox game developed by Pugstorm. Currently in early access, the game features mechanics similar to other games in the sandbox genre such as Minecraft, Terraria and Stardew Valley, including mining, crafting, farming and exploration in a procedurally generated underground world. It was released to Steam in early access on 8 March 2022 and received praise for its game mechanics, art style, and tone and atmosphere and you can play with friends. The game is set to release on Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4 in Summer 2024.

References

  1. "Retrieved from official The Blockheads forums. Stated by MajicDave, or Dave Frampton". June 13, 2017.
  2. "How to host a SP world with Game Center". The Blockheads. April 16, 2017. Retrieved May 25, 2023.
  3. "Exploration, mining, crafting, and building sandbox game". The Blockheads. Retrieved September 20, 2016.
  4. "Retrieved from the official forums, which is noted as trustworthy due to the fact David Frampton, the creator, stated this fact himself". June 16, 2017.
  5. "The Blockheads Review". Toucharcade.com. May 2013. Retrieved November 29, 2015.
  6. "The Blockheads for iPhone/iPad Reviews - Metacritic". Metacritic.com. Retrieved November 29, 2015.
  7. "Winding down the forums". The Blockheads. March 10, 2022. Retrieved April 12, 2022.
  8. "Wheres the safe apk to download the game?". The Blockheads. April 9, 2021. Retrieved April 9, 2021.
  9. "Closing down The Blockheads cloud servers". The Blockheads. August 22, 2022. Retrieved August 24, 2022.