MineCraft-One-Week-Challenge

About

Minecraft is Mojang Studios' sandbox game, first released in alpha in 2009 and formally released for PC in November 2011. This is a Minecraft clone in C++ and OpenGL, made in one week as a challenge for a YouTube video and edited further afterward. It has chunked terrain with block editing, a skybox, height-map world generation with trees, a simple item system, and directional lighting. In November 2025 it was updated to SFML 3.

How it differs from the original

The world is a fixed size: the author made it infinite during development but reverted that change. The author points players wanting a more complete C++ Minecraft-like game to Minetest.

Getting started

On Windows, install the dependencies through vcpkg and open the Visual Studio project. On Linux, install vcpkg plus the listed system packages, then use the included build and run scripts, with an optional release mode.

History

The README logs the challenge day by day: rendering setup and a camera on day one, chunk meshing on days two and three, world generation on day four, items on day five, optimization on day six and lighting on day seven. Earlier snapshots are linked, including the version shown in the video and a higher-quality graphics branch with a day/night cycle that caused rendering issues for many people.

Additional notes

Bug story

A chunk-rendering bug that took three hours to find came from telling OpenGL the indices were unsigned bytes when they were actually unsigned ints.

External link

The accompanying video is at youtube.com/watch?v=Xq3isov6mZ8.