With the recent rise in cube-oriented, voxel-centric games -- especially with open world adventure games, like Cube World, which combines Zelda, Minecraft, and Diablo -- we've been looking for the RTS variation of this programmatic and artistic direction. That variation is Sauropod Studio's Castle Story.

It's like a flashback from the early 2000s and late 90s: for those that remember, the series "The Settlers" had large, resource-filled maps, workers eager to pile resources or refine them, and warriors ready to defend your city-building/RTS empire.

Castle Story features "Bricktrons," or the small, yellow, generally mysterious inhabitants of the floating islands in the game. Cast into a shattered and disjointed world, your job is to guide Bricktrons to collect resources, lay down plans for completely customized, non-templated buildings, establish strongholds to defend your new-found citizens, and conquer the skies.

"I fart in your general direction!"

The game aims to appeal to Creators and Explorers, centering itself entirely around block-by-block building of any structure you can imagine. Dig moats around your handcrafted fortresses, place explosives on key bridges that lead to your capital city to prevent invasion, sneak Bricktrons into enemy towers and plant bombs, and wage war against AI and humans alike.

Castle Story has a full day/night cycle and has already laid the groundwork for its mining, resource gathering, and building infrastructures. Floating islands, of course, have limited resources on a per-island level, but players can instruct Bricktrons to construct bridges to other islands to gather additional resources. If you've been looking for a "Minecraft RTS" style game to play, this might be your ticket.

You can set the mining areas for your Bricktrons to dig for resources and, if you deem it so, they'll dig straight through the floating rock and fall to their doom below. Classic Lemmings. Resources have slowly leaked their way onto Sauropod's YouTube page, so far showing us primarily wood and stone.

Sauropod Studio is developing Castle Story on the Unity3D engine and plans to natively support Windows and Mac, but have hinted that additional platforms may be added as the game picks up interest. They have also promised that the game will cost "less than a million dollars, for sure."

Castle Story is still in full development and, as stated on the official FAQ, hasn't been given any form of release date yet. There are plenty of screenshots online and they've posted a few videos so far; we'll make sure any big news is posted and analyzed on GN, as always, so keep an eye on this space for more info.