Imagine an expansive, randomly-generated atmosphere that is flooded with unique creatures, troves of hostile warriors, snot-leaking giants, villages, and fantastical environments with massive trees, waterfalls, and the like. A place to explore and conquer - to quest and customize your gear, build homes, and work with NPCs.

That world is "Cube World," an impressive fusion of Zelda, Diablo, and Minecraft.

Independent developer and blogger "Wollay" has been working on his voxel-based project, codenamed "Cube World," since June 2011; Wollay aims to build a game that has endless, random terrain comprised entirely of blocks but implements classes, levels, and other popular RPG elements. He will take the best of some of our favorite games: Diablo's dungeon-crawling elements and originality of monsters; Zelda's artistic direction, setting, and mobs/quests; Minecraft's endlessness and design direction; and a few pinches of other games -- I taste some EverQuest in that RPG soup.

Yes, that is what you think it is.

If you've taken our gamer personality test, this game is perfect for those of the "Adventurer" and "Builder" personalities. These types of games are perfect for "the meta game," an approach to gaming that we explored where you "create your own fun" -- sort of a game within a game.

Here's a simplified list of features for Wollay's Cube World:

Multiplayer support.

Numerous pets.

Player customization: hair, faces, and more.

Classes: Mages, warriors, and whatever else he can come up with.

Building: Use predefined blueprints and materials to build.

Quests: Encounter NPCs and obtain quests for experience, items, and exploration.

Upgradable and customizable weapons and armor.

Numerous fantasy-oriented items.

Weapon/armor crafting.

Generated, beautiful atmospheres.

Did I mention pets?

The blueprint system aims to save time and allow for flexibility of design.

Cube World is not currently planning to implement mining and digging, which, if you ask me, is preferable. Accumulating resources eternally and without purpose can only be appealing in so many games, after all. Of course, it would be nice to have terrain moving/destruction features to better accommodate houses, but we'll see how things turn out.

D'awww

Wollay has noted several times in his blog that he's aiming to optimize his game from a programmatic perspective, hopefully giving us something a bit more host-able than the largely instable and memory-hungry Minecraft. For those that care, he is developing the game with C++ and DirectX. He's working entirely alone and plans to keep it that way.

A fan-made trailer:

Cube World is targeted at Windows systems at the moment, though he hopes to integrate Mac support in the future.

If you're as excited as I am, be sure to stay tuned to our page and check for updates on this game. In the meantime, you may be interested in modding Skyrim's graphics to reflect retro games to achieve something as close to Cube World as possible.

View more awesome screenshots and videos on his blog: http://wollay.blogspot.com/

I'm so excited for this game.

-Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.