UemeU is born of Minecraft. Jeremy Hindle, the project lead, was heavily involved in the community of that game and the spirit of play and creation that made Mojang's sandbox the sandbox to play in, is evident here.

It's raw, and in its current alpha state, a little rough around the edges, but from what we've seen so far there's plenty there for creative minds to work with. One of UemeU's selling points is that you can easily shift between play and create, and so with friends around you could potentially have one person making something, and others testing it out straight away.

Our hands-on time actually makes us ponder a fundamental question; what is a game? There's two ways of looking at UemeU. It can be considered both a game and a tool; a powerful and creative game where players can have fun and make their own experiences, or perhaps a game creation tool that has much in common with the toolsets that build many of the games that we play (but loses some of the polish that software like Unity and Unreal are able to achieve because of the focus on accessibility).

There's plenty of potential in UemeU, that much is immediately obvious. Gamers interested in creating their own playgrounds will have many different options available to them. You can create your own objects, adjust shape, size, and textures. You can place them wherever you like, and you can replicate them. You can group together several different objects and create complex structures, and you can clone these and make them again and again. You can also share them with the community, and use their creations to inform your own designs.

During our hands-on time with the software, we were given a tour of the basic functions and systems. We watched as Hindle made several simple objects, decorated them, moved them around, and cloned them. Then, when the work was over, we switched from creator mode into play mode and, from the game's third-person perspective, jumped and double-jumped around the objects freshly laid down during the demonstration.

The build mode puts you in control of a disembodied hand with the power to create and mould the world around it.

Two very different examples of the kinds of environments that can be built with UemeU.

It actually gets much more complicated than just dropping down blocks and shapes. There's a complex physics engine that, while it might take a while to learn, will offer players plenty of opportunity to create puzzles and visual features, and will allow the opportunity to establish the physical laws of each world. Or, of course, you could just create something fun like the series of bouncing balls and watch them ping around the world you've just created. The spirit of UemeU is that it's very much down to you.

As a means of demonstrating exactly what the game was capable of producing, during our time we were also taken on a tour of a mock-up of the first level of Bioshock. We were told that it took around six hours to build. It was of decent size and surprisingly reminiscent, if a little rough, but it was unmistakably Rapture.

It was in the distinctive underwater corridors that we were introduced to the systems that will will allow players to activate and close doors, and put down portals, script and animate events, and things of that nature. It's actually really disorientating keeping up with another player while switching between the create and play modes in corridor-like spaces, but moving around and creating new objects and adding things to the environment seems really easy to do.

You get a standard avatar, but this can be personalised and adapted according to player preference.

In the next part of the demo we actually found it rather difficult to control our avatar thanks to a plummeting frame-rate, and this was down to server issues (they're in the process of changing them over, a move that'll hopefully improve things immeasurably). Eventually we stopped trying to move around and just stared at a recreation of a Kandinsky painting and listened to Hindle map out his vision for the game looking forward.

He foresees a community growing around the game, where people create their own content and share it with other players. He sees communities growing around games and other IPs, where fans share their own creations and link their homage together. He thinks that we'll have gamers building entire worlds and linking them via portals, creating a multi-verse of different player-created worlds.

There's plenty more to come, with combat and item building on the agenda, on top of the improvements to infrastructure that we were told about. The upcoming distributed server system will potentially host hundreds of permanent worlds, with the possibility of people setting up their own servers and making dedicated worlds within them; their own games, their own sandboxes, maybe even something as bold as their own MMOs.

They've got a good partner in Jagex, who'll be able to help guide them and offer support where they need it. They're also offering up regular updates (every two weeks) and each of these sees new features added to the mix. There's already a lot there, with a robust set of tools on hand, and more and more features added at regular intervals. As Hindle explained, there's currently an overwhelming majority of players creating and building content, but as there's more for people to explore/experience in worlds created by others, he envisages a time when increasing numbers of players jump on the UemeU servers just to have fun and play, not to create.

The infrastructure will have to be sound if they're to make good on their ambition, and as it stands this vision still looks a long way off. There's already plenty of options out there, with free game creation software on the market for the more technically minded, and sandbox titles like Minecraft already with a long-established player base. UemeU sits somewhere between the two. There's also Landmark from Sony Online Entertainment, which looks like it'll scratch a similar itch. With such competition already in place, UemeU has a long way to go before Jeremy Hindle's vision comes to pass. It's all going to come down to community; if they can facilitate high amounts of collective creativity, and can build on that, more will come.