Thank you :) (recognize the username)

Both of these are things that I (massively) failed to address early on and am actually now striving towards.

I'm actually pretty happy at this point. If my wage were raised just slightly, and the threat of running out of (non-investor) money was not looming, I would be 100 percent happy. Wouldn't take millions, but nonetheless its good to aim high. :)

Currently working on putting out at least a minimally viable game to accompany the engine, which will be released with source this coming March (fingers crossed). I'm taking community input for the most part as to what they want to see in the game, filtered by my judgment.

Minecraft has actually been a great case study for me in terms of marketing. There are many Minecraftian games, but none have really reached the success of Minecraft (even though many clones generated millions), and you have to ask why that is. There are many theories, but mine is that:

A) Minecraft's success was a self-fulfilling prophecy (the more successful it was, the more news it generated, and thus the more sales it drove). This is not to say, at all, that any of its success was not well-deserved.

B) It appealed to the younger generation in a (say, ages 4 to 14) in a way that many people are still failing to grasp. A huge amount of marketing revolved around user-made Youtube videos. I don't think I can do this, but still it is interesting to analyze. It was immediately accessible but showed its potential for further development which is why it was so successful in pioneering the early access model.

C) Markus Persson is a likeable guy, and an entertaining read on Twitter. He created a culture around Minecraft. He is also genuine - he really takes part in the indie community, cares about what people say, and actively develops even though he no longer needs to. Another part of this is because he has befriended and surrounded himself with other interesting people, and curates interesting content. He has almost 2 million followers at this point, including the vast majority of the gaming press, so single tweets can have powerful effects.

The project is really impressive, you have some truly beautiful examples in the gallery. I see what you mean that user content creation doesn't seem easily accessible enough to hit Minecraft's level of self-marketing. But there is tremendous potential I think once you reach a more fleshed-out demo. Hope to see that soon.

Yes, I don't think I will ever achieve Minecraft's level of success, in part due to the fact that I'm designing something relatively niche and for a less broad age range. But still, I'm curious to see what the potential of it is.