Minecraft has been incredibly lucrative for 4J Studios. The Dundee-based firm, which was established in 2005 by Chris van der Kuyl, Paddy Burns, and Frank Arnot, has ported Mojang’s game to almost every console under the sun since 2012.
“They did really well off of Minecraft,” says Brian Gomez, executive producer and creative director at 4J, noting that the studio’s leadership had the foresight to negotiate a royalty arrangement. “And that has just generated incredible wealth for themselves and for the studio.”
Arnot left 4J in 2012, but van der Kuyl and Burns remain, now chairman and CEO, respectively. “What I like about them is that those two should be floating on a yacht or sitting on a beach somewhere and just enjoying retirement, because that’s maybe what I would do,” says Gomez. “Some people win the lottery or they become very rich and it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m going to go collect exotic cars and that’s my thing’. Their thing is making games.”
“Nobody is saying, ‘Boy, do I love the game industry right now'”
He thinks it takes a special kind of commitment to remain under the current circumstances. “Nobody is saying, ‘Boy, do I love the game industry right now’. It’s garbage right now. It was ‘survive until ’25’, and well, we’re past ’25 and halfway through ’26, and things are still garbage. So these two guys could have easily just folded up shop and said, ‘You know what? Forget it. I’ve got an island to go to’. But they don’t, because this is the thing they’re passionate about.”
Now, after well over a decade of porting and updating Minecraft, 4J is having a stab at making its own Minecraft-style game: Reforj. Partly, it’s a pragmatic decision. “We would probably still be in the Minecraft business, except that around 2019, Paddy saw the writing on the wall,” says Gomez. Microsoft (which bought Mojang in 2014) began pulling development in house, “so we knew that our time making those royalties off of Minecraft was probably limited, and that if we wanted to have a future as a studio, we needed to do other things – we couldn’t just put everything in the Minecraft basket.”
Technology led
“We still wanted to make games in this type of genre,” says Gomez, noting that the developers at 4J still very much enjoy working on Minecraft after all these years, and have become very good at making the game sing on consoles. “So we thought, well, how would we reinvent this wheel?”
He says that Burns put a question to the engineering team back in around 2019: if we had a chance to make our own open-world, voxel-based engine, what would you do? After years trying to get Minecraft to work on all sorts of devices, the team had a few ideas about what their own, homegrown game engine might look like.
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Burns laid out a couple of ground rules. First, he wanted the engine to run at 60 frames a second, no matter what ridiculous levels of destruction were happening on screen. Second, he wanted the engine to be designed around a controller rather than a mouse, and to run natively on current consoles. “So with those things in mind, we set about making what became the Elements Engine,” says Gomez.
Sometime around 2023/24, the engine was stable enough for 4J to begin work on designing a game. But what would they make?
“The design team set about coming up with pitches based on different types, different genres, different audiences, very different games,” says Gomez. “We came up with about six different concepts that made it through the final running of what we wanted to do next. And a lot of them were, I’d say, more niche.”
The broadest one was what became Reforj: a survival crafting game in the vein of Hytale or Minecraft. But there are a few key differences. One is that each world is a fully destructible, four kilometre by four kilometre planetoid that loops around, rather than a vast open world. The size limit helps to keep the performance high, but planetoids can be linked by portals to enable greater scale.
Another difference is that the Elements Engine permits the creation of much higher fidelity creations than Minecraft’s simple 1×1 blocks will allow. “Ours has got 660 different shapes,” Gomez says.
To begin with, players create a basic model – a house, perhaps – using simple cubes, in a similar way to Minecraft. But then they can use the sculpting tool to refine and change the shapes, allowing much more detail. “So they might pick a staircase shape, and then they just point the cursor at that block, and then they can transform it into a staircase,” explains Gomez.
On top of the sculpting tool, there’s a circuit system that involves bouncing rays of Aura off reflective blocks to power objects. The “pioneer” players of the game have already used the circuit system to create complicated experiences. “There’s splitters, there’s logic gates like AND/OR, there’s inverters if you want to flip a signal from being weak to powerful, or vice versa,” explains Gomez. “Somebody was able to actually make a playable Space Invaders game, which just blew us away.”
Time for a story
One big way in which Reforj differs from Minecraft is in its integration of a wide-reaching narrative from the off – something that was only grafted on to Minecraft much later through various different media.
“We wanted there to be a story,” says Gomez. “I mean, my background is I’ve done a ton of writing for different games before, so I am a story guy, I’m a narrative guy.” Among his many previous positions, Gomez was the design director on Silent Hill: Downpour, and later became the senior manager of creative development at Disney Interactive, before moving on to be executive producer of the Jurassic games at Universal. “Basically anything digital and dinosaurs at Universal was through me,” he says.
“You never worried about that when you lived in Scotland”
But before all that, he was creative director at VIS Entertainment in Edinburgh, the studio behind the Rockstar-published PS2 title State of Emergency. VIS was wound down in 2005, but many of the folks there ended up at 4J – and in 2022, van der Kuyl was able to tempt Gomez away from his life in Los Angeles and back to Scotland. Partly, the decision to relocate was about safety.
“My wife’s an educator, and she had a lockdown at her school,” says Gomez. “Nothing actually happened, but it was a scare. And she said, ‘I realised in that moment that I’d be willing to sacrifice my life for my students. I hope you’ll forgive me if that ever happens.’ So I told Chris about that conversation, and he said, ‘You never worried about that when you lived in Scotland, right?’ I said, ‘You’re right.’ He said, ‘Would you like to come back? Because I have a job for you if you’d like to come back’.”
One of the motivations for introducing a story to Reforj was “a fear of seeing what happened with Minecraft,” says Gomez. “Minecraft had such a blank slate – that was a strength, because people could tell their own stories in it, as Joe Garrett did [aka the YouTuber Stampy]. But then it comes to the film, and now they’ve got to invent lore. And is it Notch and company inventing that lore?”
The story that Gomez and the 4J team have come up with involves a conflict between two civilizations known as the Gatekeepers and Tunnellers. But the game has been carefully designed to make the narrative optional: players will encounter ruins, artefacts, and technology that give hints about what has happened, but they are also free to ignore it all if they wish. However, one piece of lore directly affects the game’s difficulty. Players will collect Aura, the substance that powers the game’s circuits, and the more of the substance they stockpile, the more it will attract the insect-like Tunnellers to invade their world.
Stamp of approval
The aforementioned Joe Garrett – better known as the Minecraft YouTuber Stampy, whose channel has over 10 million subscribers – was initially a friend of the studio, but went on to be employed as a member of the Reforj design team.
“He had crossed paths with 4J early on,” explains Gomez. “Anytime he’d come up to Scotland, they would give him tours of the studio… So when it came time to make the Elements Engine, we gave him a very early look at it.” Garrett’s feedback proved invaluable, and Gomez spoke to Garrett about what a more formal relationship would look like.
“My most important thing was I just wanted to get a feel from Joe about what his expectations were,” he says. “And I just wanted to make sure that he didn’t just want to make Minecraft, because I didn’t want to just make Minecraft. I didn’t walk away from a pretty good career at Universal just to go and make Minecraft.
“And he made it really clear. He was like, ‘I don’t want to just make Minecraft. There’s so many things I want to do in this genre that are different’. So once I saw that there was the creative chemistry there, I was like, ‘Well, do you just want to be a member of the design team?'”
“I didn’t want to just make Minecraft”
Garrett came up with the Aura energy system, but in addition, as someone who has played an enormous amount of Minecraft and other crafting games, he provided some key input on the controls. “Joe was very much at the core of getting the sculpting to feel right,” says Gomez.
“We just watch him play. Imagine if you made basketballs, and then you had LeBron James or somebody on your team, and you go, ‘Here’s a new basketball, go try it.’ And then you watch them play basketball, and then they can tell you all the things that are wrong with that basketball. And then you’re like, ‘Okay, come on, let’s go re-engineer it’. That’s what it’s like.”
Room for one more
It’s clear that Reforj shares a lot of DNA with Minecraft, but the game also expands on Mojang’s 15-year-old original in a number of ways, most notably with the much more nuanced crafting abilities that veer away from simple blocks. The Elements Engine also offers a significant upgrade on the tech of the original – in a demo given to GamesIndustry.biz, even exploding a mountain with a vast column of TNT didn’t cause the frame rate to blink.
It’s also clear there’s room for more games beyond Minecraft in this genre, something that was proven by the huge launch of Hytale earlier this year, months after Riot Games pulled its backing. “We’re rooting for those guys,” says Gomez. “It sucked that they lost their publisher the way they did. We were all amazed that they were able to get something out so quickly.”
Gomez says it makes sense that there’s space for more than one block-based survival crafting game, giving the example of first-person shooters. “Just because you play Halo doesn’t mean that you’ll never play Call of Duty or something else.”
Yet he is under no illusions that Reforj will topple Minecraft from its lofty perch. “4J has a lot of love for Minecraft, and we don’t honestly expect people to abandon Minecraft for Reforj, in the same way that people don’t abandon Call of Duty for Halo,” he says. But 4J is confident the two can coexist alongside, with curious players keen to see what new tricks Reforj can bring to the genre. “We do think we offer something very different from Minecraft.”
