Minecraft Console Dev Announces New Sandbox Game Reforj

4J Studios, the team behind the console versions of Minecraft, has announced Reforj, a new survival sandbox title. The game is being developed for PC and current-gen consoles and will use a proprietary voxel sandbox engine. It is currently in its pre-alpha stage.

Chris van der Kuyl, 4J’s founder and chairman, has gone on record to say that the studio intends to build Reforj “with the community.” In January, the company hired popular YouTuber Stampy to work as a game designer on the project.

“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,” van der Kuyl said in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. “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.”

4J Studios previously developed HD remasters of Perfect Dark and Banjo-Kazooie.

“We love creative sandbox gaming. And we realized 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.

“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 hard drive. [This proprietary 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.”