At first glance, Stonegard might look an awful lot like Minecraft – that’s something creator Ben Johnson acknowledges – but it aspires to eventually become something quite a lot different. In terms of core mechanics, it shares similarities; players collect blocks and place them to create structures, but in Stonegard, these structures have a purpose. It’s an exclusively multiplayer game in which players create “Kingdoms”, and then fight each other; its similarities to Minecraft aside, it’s aiming to be a pretty fun and original indie title.

“It’s a difficult subject,” Ben tells me, when I ask him how he feels about the game being set back because of its visual similarity to Notch’s successful title. “A lot of people are just going to instantly say ‘oh, it’s just like Minecraft – I’ll play Minecraft instead’ just by the fact that you build blocks. But hopefully a lot of the features in the game will convince people otherwise. There’s also the visual aspect – I guess a lot of the characters look like they do in Minecraft, because they’re pixellated, but a lot of the world is in a higher resolution, with textures kind of like the vector art you see in web comics.”

Building an engine that uses the same voxel-based gameplay as Minecraft is challenging in itself; Ben says that getting the lighting to work in the same sort of fashion was the biggest issue he’s run into in development. “I really like Minecraft and I really like their lighting, because it doesn’t go through walls, and so on – and it affects the world in a way, like things don’t spawn in light areas. And to get that sort of light propagation is a lot trickier than I thought it would be.”

Unlike the Java-built Minecraft, Stonegard is built with C# and the XNA Framework, but Ben’s more or less ruled out the possibility of it coming to Xbox 360. “I’d like to, but the problem with Xbox is the networking is a bit annoying, because you have to do it peer-to-peer. That doesn’t really work in terms of my game; you really play on a centralised server with other players.” While he draws comparisons with Diablo and Baldur’s Gate, it’s clear Stonegard has the multiplayer focus neither of those has.

“What I really like about Minecraft is that you can build stuff – the problem is that what you build has no purpose. What I try to do within my game is give it purpose. You can build a shop and then put a shopkeeper in it, and then fill that shop with items, set their price, whatever. And all the other players can buy from it. Or you can build a bank where you can allow players to store their goods.” It’s not quite on the scale of a Minecraft MMO, but it certainly pushes above and beyond the Survival Mode found in the game.

The game is in its the later stages of development, but Ben is still mixed on the topic of single-player. “There may be single-player. I’m not sure yet,” he says. “I’m not sure if it’s worth doing single-player, because I think the real fun of it is going to be playing with other people, because you can create these ‘Kingdoms’ and battle amongst each other. If you’re on your own, it may not be as much fun. But it’s a possibility.”

Development on Stonegard is currently “about 60% of the way through”, and you can follow Ben’s work on it on his blog here. This concludes the third day of zConnection’s Indie Week 2011, during which we’ll be taking a look at seven indie developers over seven days to bring their work to light. You can return to the Indie Week page by clicking here, and follow the #zcindieweek hashtag on Twitter by clicking here.