The Minecraft studio and Minecraft YouTuber looking to transform sandbox gaming

When I heard that Joseph Garrett, aka the Minecraft YouTuber known as Stampy, was 'joining' 4J Studios to work on a new game, I dismissed it as a bit of a marketing stunt.

4J is the Dundee studio that's best known for developing the console versions of Minecraft. They've worked with Garrett on numerous occasions, including appearances together at Minecon. And it was easy to assume this latest collaboration was an extension of that kind of promotional activity.

I was wrong.

"It's not full time, but this is the majority of my work week," Garrett tells us. "It averages out at about three days a week here. It's definitely not a thing where I check in once a month and give some notes and then go off and do my own thing. I have been incorporated as part of the team."

4J founder and chairman Chris van der Kuyl adds: "There have been plenty of cases where big teams bring in this consultant, or this amazing creative from the movie industry… but you know that means they come in for a day, the team has to listen and take notes, and then they head off and the team gets back to actually making the game. Joe is part of the team. He gets team tasks."

Garrett's switch from YouTuber to game designer may seem sudden, but it was actually not quite as surprising as it first appears. He explains to us that he's known for creating games within Minecraft, and when 4J came knocking, he'd already decided to end his popular series of Minecraft videos 'Stampy's Lovely World'.

"We'd always got on really well," explains van der Kuyl. "So Paddy [Burns], my co-founder, and I said to him: 'We're building this game. We think you're one of the smartest people in sandbox games. We've always loved your feedback. We want to build this with the community… what could be better than you joining?' And that's what has happened."

4J is lifting the lid on its major new original game: Reforj. It's a creative survival sandbox game and, considering the experience of the people involved, the comparisons to Minecraft are inevitable.

Yet Minecraft is a monster of a game, a fact that both Garrett and van der Kuyl know all too well. And although there's no disputing the expertise of the team, building a game that will be compared to a major, entrenched title operated by one of the biggest companies in the world… that is quite the undertaking.

"The fact this is coming from 4J means that the comparisons to Minecraft are unavoidable," says Garrett. "We've already had articles about 4J making Minecraft 2. But that's not what we're trying to do. Despite all of us being huge fans of Minecraft, we don't need to make another one. It already exists."

"We've already had articles about 4J making Minecraft 2. But that's not what we're trying to do. We don't need to make another one. It already exists."

Joseph Garrett, 4J Studios

"Everyone has to have a frame of reference," van der Kuyl reasons. "But it will be a very different gameplay experience, That doesn't mean they will still play the games they play and love every day. They will. That's something we revel in. We still have a marketplace in Minecraft. This is just something brand new for people who love the genre, and we don't think they've had anything new for quite a long time."

The key thing is that nobody is expecting Minecraft numbers.

"We have zero targets. We don't think we should have X players by a certain date," van der Kuyl explains.

"Because we're a small company, we don't have a massive day one shipping title. As long as there is a community that love this game and gives us feedback, then it will snowball from there. If we can see we're making an impact on how people play this genre and what they enjoy, the audience will come with that."

Part of the reason for hiring Garrett is that 4J is taking a community-focused approach with Reforj. The idea is to get community members involved at the very earliest opportunity, and Garrett is part of that world.

"In the 1990s we believed that game developers were the new rockstars… but I actually think we're more like Fender and Gibson," van der Kuyl says, "We make musical instruments, and we have people like Joe taking those instruments and playing tunes on them that we didn't think possible. We're looking to this generation of creatives, and this will be the most creator-friendly game out there, to take our game and show us journeys and stories, and find things in our games that we didn't think were there."

He continues: "Joe has things like his Bonus Points podcast, and it means we have someone on the team who is as connected to the community as anybody could be.

"We've already had the first group of YouTubers we know in the studio, and as soon as possible there will be a pre-alpha version to play."

The key is not to plan too far ahead.

"We have thought about what the future could look like," van der Kuyl admits. "But we don't want to pre-judge it. This isn't us saying it'll be community-led, meanwhile we're really 25 versions on in the studio. This will be as close to real time as we can make it, where people can influence this game."

The Reforj team remains small. 4J has around 50 employees and not all of them are working on the game yet. 4J believes that by having too many people on a project too early results in doing things before the full scope of the game is established, which leads to inefficiencies.

Yet they do expect the full studio to join the project. And 4J has investments in other developers, which means they already have an eye on who they can partner with in the future. Plus, there has been some team expansion already on the community side.

"There is now a full time videographer," says Garrett. "A few weeks ago we hired 4J's first ever community manager. And that's an area I'll be helping out with a lot as well. That was an area that, a lot of time, was handle by [co-founder] Paddy. But now we have people who have a dedicated job of speaking with the community."

"The 4J Twitter, with its almost half a million followers… Paddy has been doing that himself," van der Kuyl laughs. "It's because he has incisive and interesting things to say from time-to-time. And we wanted to make sure we don't lose that authentic tone of voice. But we're moving that from something we do in our spare time, to something that is a big part of us as a brand going forward."

"In the 1990s we believed that game developers were the new rockstars… but I actually think we're more like Fender and Gibson"

Chris van der Kuyl, 4J Studios

This is a big step for 4J. The studio has a strong reputation for technically impressive ports. Even before Minecraft, it was known for adaptations of games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and the HD remasters of Banjo-Kazooie and Perfect Dark.

But it's not made many original games. Last year it experimented with an original concept, a party game called Manic Mechanics.

"It was an Unreal game that was completely original," van der Kuyl explains. "For us, the most important thing was seeing how the studio came together with no external reference points. That was us with a blank piece of paper. It was great fun and prepared us for [Reforj]."

Even so, 4J is a small studio. It has limited experience in original titles. It's making a game all about the community yet up until a few weeks ago it didn't even have a community manager. And it's creating a title that will inevitably get compared to one of the biggest and most influential video games in the world… this seems like a huge risk.

Except there's one secret weapon that we've not talked about. And it's the thing that explains van der Kuyl's clear confidence and convinced Garrett to change careers: the Elements Engine.

"We started on the Elements Engine about five years ago," details van der Kuyl. "The obvious question is that Unity and Unreal have taken over the market, so why do this? Well, we love creative sandbox gaming. And we realised that nobody had really thought about features that you'd want to be accelerated by next gen that would benefit sandbox gaming. Of course we want nice graphics and shiny water. But there were opportunities around using GPU acceleration for something different.

"Generally when you get these block building games, or voxel-based games, they start to get performance restrictive quite early. So we asked ourselves, could we build an engine that gave you persistent 60-frames-per-second in this kind-of game. It may be a geeky thing to say, but for a player it would transform their experience."

The firm showed off the engine three months ago on YouTube, and the video has already attracted over half a million views. "We only expected the core 4J fans of 10,000 or 20,000 people to see it," van der Kuyl explains.

Introducing... the Elements Engine

Watch on YouTube

It looks technically impressive, and part of that is this is an engine for current hardware. It's not something that will run on smartphones or Nintendo Switch or PS4.

"It does mean that people who have older generations won't be able to play Reforj, but we think that number will be less and less," van der Kuyl continues. "And the tax to pay for features that we couldn't support in order to get 60 frames per second… other games are going to have to pay that tax for some time because they are compatible with those older platforms going forward.

"We've got no fixed plans to come to mobile today, but we know that mobile will catch-up with that architecture. Apple's latest announcement… it's different architecture to PC and console, but it is pretty powerful. This gives us a place to build from and we're not hamstrung by the past."

Garrett stresses that the focus on the latest hardware is not about fancy visual flourishes, but it has informed the design of the game entirely.

"It's not just about us looking at ray-tracing. It's about… the world's saves being really efficient. It is this big sandbox world, but it doesn't save the world, it just saves the changes you made to the world, so it means that the world saves are really small and can load really efficiently. We have gateways in the world where you can travel to other worlds and create new ones, and it all links seamlessly. It wouldn't be possible if you're loading data off a harddrive. [This engine] is not just adding bells and whistles to the game, it is about core design function and mechanism that is made possible by having Xbox Series S as the baseline."

It's certainly an ambitious new chapter for 4J, and for now, it's going alone. Yet, in time, it might seek support from bigger publishers and organisations.

"Fingers crossed, with the scale of this game, there will be many partners at the table, I'm sure," van der Kuyl says. "We are aware that we're small. We can build this game from zero to something pretty substantial, but we also have an ambition that this could grow and grow to a big global audience. So there might be a time for us to speak to partners."

Indeed, for now it's about something much smaller. Building something quickly, getting it in front of community experts and finding out what they want. Reforj is a game that's going to be co-developed by fans, and in the case of Joseph Garrett, that's happening in a very literal way.

"Joe is basically player zero for us," van der Kuyl concludes. "If Joe believes in this game, he will tell us. Yes, he is part of the team, but we know him more than well enough to know he'll be brutally honest with us on what he does and doesn't like. And the YouTubers we've just had in the studio was the next step on that journey."