The Word of Notch
Month
Back before anyone knew who I was, I used to wanted to make huge games. Games where you can do anything, and everything you see in the game is there for a reason in the game. No fake doors that don’t lead anywhere, no trees you can’t cut down, and no made up story being told to the player to motivate them. Instead, the player would make their own story, and interact with the game world, decide for themselves what they want to do.
I’ve worked on two games like this. The first one I made with Rolf, and it was called Wurm Online, and it’s slow and grindy, but amazing. A few years later, I made Minecraft just as indie games were becoming a big thing, and it absolutely exploded. Because I enjoy talking to the players and community, and possibly because I will gladly share my opinions on things, I became recognized and got loads of fans. And then my tweets started becoming gaming news.
About a year ago, I started working on a third “omg you can do anything” game, called 0x10c. It was supposed to be a space game about actually being in character in space rather than playing as a space ship like you do in most space games. You’d try to keep your ship live while shooting aliens with laser guns, putting out fires and programming your own virtual computer in the ship. It was quite ambitious, but I was fairly sure I could pull it off. And besides, if I failed, so what? A lot of my prototypes fail way before they get anywhere at all.
What I hadn’t considered was that a lot more people cared about my games now. People got incredibly excited, and the pressure of suddenly having people care if the game got made or not started zapping the fun out of the project. I spent a lot of time thinking about if I even wanted to make games any more. I guess I could just stop talking about what I do, but that doesn’t really come all that natural to me. Over time I kinda just stopped working on it, and then eventually decided to mentally file it as “on ice” and try doing some smaller things. Turns out, what I love doing is making games. Not hyping games or trying to sell a lot of copies. I just want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak.
Recently, I was streaming some Team Fortress 2, and got asked about the progress on 0x10c. I said I wasn’t working on it, and it became news. I understand why, and it really shouldn’t surprise me, but I really really don’t want to turn into another under delivering visionary game designer. The gaming world has enough of those.
Some people in the 0x10c community decided to work together to make their own version of their game, called Project Trillek. I find this absolutely amazing. I want to play this game so much, but I am not the right person to make it. Not any more. I’m convinced a new team with less public interest can make a vastly superior game than what I would make.
Last week, I participated in the 7dfps and made a hectic shooter greatly inspired by Doom, called Shambles, and it was some of the most fun programming I’ve done in many months. This is what I want to do. I want to do smaller games that can fail. I want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak.
So that’s what I’m going to do.
I’ll also keep talking to the players and I’ll keep streaming myself rocket jumping in tf2 for whoever wants to listen to or watch that, but for now I don’t want to work on anything big.
One of my fondest childhood memories is me sitting on a sled, being dragged along a thinly snow covered road by my dad. I was looking up at him and reflecting on the fact that he is also an individual person, just as I am. He has his own thoughts, his own wants, and his own memories. He’d had an entire life to live before I even existed.
Before he had me and my sister, he struggled with substance abuse and addiction, but managed to get over it with the help of religion and will power. I never knew anything about this, and never suspected anything until he had a relapse when I was a young teenager. This led to my parents breaking up and me not talking to him for a couple of years. When I eventually got over it and forgave him, we developed a very close and loving relationship.
He was around when Rolf and I made Wurm Online, and would play it a lot. He ran his own homestead and built some alliances, before finally getting tired of the game and moving on to Half Life 1 and 2. He’d sometimes call me and ask how to get past a certain point, and I would try to give him subtle hints. He had moved pretty far away in the country, both to avoid bad influences in Stockholm, and to isolate himself. I’d go visit sometimes.
Once during a spring visit, we went out with his car to a beautiful lake area and had some coffee and sandwiches, when his dog suddenly ran out on the very thin ice. We freaked out a bit and yelled at the dog to come back when the ice suddenly gave out and the dog fell in. It struggled to get up for a while before giving up and just hanging on to the ice, at which point my dad lays down on the ice and starts sliding out towards the dog. I’m running around, looking for a long stick or something (I wasn’t entirely sure what I would do with it, I just vaguely remembered something about long sticks being useful for ice accidents). I find one, turn around, see my dad being really close to the dog when all of the sudden a big chunk of ice around him breaks loose, tips over, and my dad falls in. I freak out. Then he stands up, the water only reaching about hip height.
The speed at which things had escalated from beautiful spring day to almost losing my dad was incredibly scary, and then suddenly realizing there never was any real danger sent me into a state of shock. I love my dad.
When I said I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who told me they supported my decision. When I made Minecraft, he was incredibly proud. He saw me win awards, and he saw the fans embrace the games, and he saw me start my own company. I said I wanted to fly him to Minecon, and he was reluctant because he wasn’t very comfortable with crowds of people, but he still went. He was obviously very proud of me the entire time, but acted a bit strange. We were afraid he had started abusing again.
He had wanted to move back to Sweden to be able to spend more time with us, so I helped him with the rent on a small house just outside of Stockholm, but at the last minute, he backed out. He had begun drinking alcohol again, and his anti-depressant drugs was making him act a bit strange at times.
The speed at which things escalated from him wanting to move back home to him shooting himself in the head was incredibly scary. His last thoughts, wants and memories was one year ago. I now have an entire life to live without him existing.
(I changed the title of this post to “goat murderer” to offend less)
An open letter to John Callaham:
I have never once said I don’t like closed platforms. I have quite a few of them laying around my house, and I love most of them. My Nintendo 3DS brings me headaches and remakes of good games, my PSP Go is pretty much the only one sold in the entire world, and my cable modem from Cisco brings me amazing internet access almost 98% of the time.
But my favorite device out of all of them is my PC. It’s an open platform, designed to be open, and to allow different hardware and software to all work together kinda-sorta crash free, and it’s amazing. I can install whatever OS I want on it, or even write my own if I happened to be a mad genius (I wish). I care a lot about my PC, and I want it to stay open, and will not participate in anything that would make it more closed.
For every user Microsoft convinces to use the Modern UI, they have one more user they get to choose what programs they can see. They get to certify programs and control the experience. This is great for them (and possibly arguable makes for a smoother end user experience as well, but that’s debatable if it’s good), but it places faaaaar too much power in the hands of a single entity.
This is my complaint.
Now, on to personal things.
You’ve never ever been cruel to animals as far as I know, and I find that very charming and manly. It’s one of the things I like most about you, in fact, and it would be a huge shame if you ever did something cruel to animals, but I know you won’t. So thank you for not being a goat murderer! It wouldn’t fit you at all!
Thanks for the personal attack,
Markus
If it wasn’t for the fact that the default Minecraft character is referred to as “Minecraft Guy” and that I once jokingly answered “Steve?” when asked what his* name was, Minecraft would be a game where gender isn’t a gameplay element.
The human model is intended to represent a Human Being. Not a male Human Being or a female Human Being, but simply a Human Being. The blocky shape gives it a bit of a traditional masculine look, but adding a separate female mesh would just make it worse by having one specific model for female Human Beings and male ones. That would force players to make a decisions about gender in a game where gender doesn’t even exist.
All the other mobs in the game are genderless and usually exhibit the most prominent traits of both genders. Cows have horns and udders (even if I’ve later learned that there are some cows where the females do have horns), and the chicken/duck/whatevers have heads that look like roosters, but still lay eggs. For breeding, any animal can breed with any other animal of the same species.
Obviously, I’m not saying this is a good way to deal with gender in all games, as the better your graphics are, and because of how quickly the human mind tries to identify the gender of other humans, you are going to have to make a decision as a developer about gender, but I felt we could get away with it in Minecraft.
There’s no point to this post. I just wanted to clarify, so there’s an official word on it.
Also, as a fun side fact, it means every character and animal in Minecraft is homosexual because there’s only one gender to choose from. Take THAT, homophobes!
* I do regret using masculine terms to talk about the default character. These days I try to use the up-and-coming use of “they” as a genderless pronoun.
This post is a reply to this: http://ricrichardson.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/mojang-reaction-incredibly-strong.html
Specifically, to this portion:
3. Patents are there to stop people stealing a technology you invented and letting you have a fair shot at making a living from it. If Uniloc wants to test this in court it is there prerogative, the same way that Mojang contested the use of the copyright term “Scrolls” and took people to court.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/113531-Bethesda-Doesnt-Enjoy-Being-Forced-into-Mojang-Lawsuit
He’s confusing four very different things here. First of all, he calls it “stealing”, but nothing is lost from the victim in the case of using the same idea. In fact, you can break this law without even knowing that someone else thought of the idea first. This is one of the biggest problems with patents; there is no good safe way to find out if any idea you come up with is patented or not. Most other crimes require intent, patent infringement does not.
Then he goes on to compare patent infringement to copyright infringement, by bringing up when Bethesda sued US for trademark infringement, while implying that it was us suing them.
So in a single bullet point, he confuses theft, copyright infringement, patent infringement and trademark infringement. And confuses us with Bethesda.
Incidentally, the fact that they want to test this case in eastern texas doesn’t surprise me one bit.
Let’s say you’re Neo, and you were the first person ever to come up with the idea of a novel. It’s like a short story, but longer, and you’re really proud of it.
Trinity then runs up to you and takes one of the few printed copies of your novel. You don’t want her to do that, as you paid good money to have it printed, and was hoping to get that money back, so you taze her. Trinity tried to commit theft.
She sulks for a bit, then asks if she can borrow one copy to read it. You say “sure”, but she sneaks off to the copy machine and starts printing her own copies of the book. You don’t want her to do that, as you want to be the only one who can make new copies of your novel, as you want to make a profit of it, so you taze her. Trinity tried to commit copyright infringement.
She sobs for a bit more, then starts writing her own novel. You don’t want her to do that, because you came up with the idea of writing a longer short story first, and you want to profit from all novels that are ever written, by anyone, so you taze her. Trinity tried to commit patent infringement.
I am fine with the concept of “owning stuff”, so I’m against theft. Society breaks down if people can’t “own stuff”.
I am mostly fine with the concept of “selling stuff you made”, so I’m also against copyright infringement. I don’t think it’s quite as bad as theft, and I’m not sure it’s good for society that some professions can get paid over and over long after they did the work (say, in the case of a game developer), whereas others need to perform the job over and over to get paid (say, in the case of a hairdresser or a lawyer). But yeah, “selling stuff you made” is good.
But there is no way in hell you can convince me that it’s beneficial for society to not share ideas. Ideas are free. They improve on old things, make them better, and this results in all of society being better. Sharing ideas is how we improve.
A common argument for patents is that inventors won’t invent unless they can protect their ideas. The problem with this argument is that patents apply even if the infringer came up with the idea independently. If the idea is that easy to think of, why do we need to reward the person who happened to be first?
I will say that there are areas which are very costly to research, but where the benefits for mankind long term are very positive. I would personally prefer it to have those be government funded (like with CERN or NASA) and patent free as opposed to what’s happening with medicine, but I do understand why some people thing patents are good in these areas.
Trivial patents, such as for software, are counterproductive (they slown down technical advancement), evil (they sacrifice baby goats to baal), and costly (companies get tied up in pointless lawsuits).
If you own a software patent, you should feel bad.
TITLE: dcpu specs, classified, not final
TO: redacted
DATE: 20120328
VERSION: 4
So in an interview, Double Fine lead Tim Schafer mentioned that they wanted to make Psychonauts 2 happen, but that nobody had been willing to fund it so far. Being a big fan of the first one, and thinking a sequel could probably be profitable, I semi-jokingly tweeted Tim about me funding a sequel.
And then the internet exploded. (Or at least my inbox did)
And then Double Fine did their highly successful kickstarter.
Here are the facts of what’s happening now, from my perspective:
* Tim and I haven’t spoken much at all other than a couple of emails.
* We mentioned meeting at GDC, I hope that will happen
* I assume Double Fine will be very busy for many months with the kickstarter project
* The budget for doing a Psychonauts 2 is three times higher than my initial impression
* A couple of other parties have mentioned also being interested in investing in it
* I would not be investing in this as a charity. It would be because I think the game would be profitable
* And naturally, I wouldn’t want to have any creative input in the game. It would be purely a high risk investment in a project I believe in.
I have NO idea if this is actually going to happen. The kickstarter stuff obviously changes the playing field a lot. Investing that incredibly high amount of money also requires a lot of planing and discussion, and I’ve never done anything like that before, but I do have contacts and advisors to help me out.
All I know is that IF the numbers work out and IF they still want to do it and IF they don’t decide to self fund a sequel by doing more crowd funding (which is honestly what I would’ve done if I were them), I would be most interested in doing this type of investment.
Point is, stop hyping over this, internet! You’re going to scare me into doing things secretly instead of being open and transparent via twitter. I am incredibly scared of the very real risk of people feeling let down just because I took a chance at something that doesn’t end up panning out.
Also, I realize you won’t stop hyping, so I’ll just go into hiding for a few years if it falls through.
We have no idea how you’re playing the Minecraft.
Right now, the only way we can figure out roughly what people are doing with the game is to track logins. Once you’re logged in, we have no idea what happens.
I was thinking it would be awesomely cool to add some kind of player tracking to the game. This would work by having the game connect to minecraft.net and send some anonymous and non-private data about the game, such as current game mode (single player, multiplayer), operating system (windows? mac?), how long you’ve been playing for (so we know how long a game session is), and whether or not you’re playing the downloaded game, or the applet on the webpage. It would probably connect every ten minutes or so so we can get some semi-realtime data. We’d share the data with the community, as usual.
Naturally, the data sent will be fully anonymous, so it wouldn’t contain any session information or your user name, and it wouldn’t send any sensitive information that you might not want to share.
Would you be ok with this? We’d really appreciate having that data!
1 hole: Sock
2 holes: Leggings
3 holes: Underwear
4 holes: Shirt
(god, this blog is dying, isn’t it?)
I am a decent programmer. I know a decent amount of computer science theory, I can type correct code fairly easy. I don’t let my classes expand too much. But I still struggle some with math, and I have a tendency to have too many cross-dependencies in my code.
I used to think I was an awesome programmer. One of the best. After I made a game in the first programming lesson in school, I got told to don’t bother showing up for the rest. I was the one who taught all my friends what big O notation is and how it’s useful, or why hashmaps can have an effective constant speed if used right.
When someone told me I was a bad programmer, I got upset. My identity was based on being The Best Programmer, and being accused of not being one was a huge insult. Of COURSE I wrote bad code sometimes, but that was just sloppyness or part of some grand scheme, or some other weak excuse.
When doing a programming test for a large US based game developer, I did well on most tests. After the programming test, they told me it was obvious that I was intelligent, but also that I was self-taught. I had to work on programming more carefully and think things through before diving in, or I’d have a hard time working in a large group. Externally, I nodded politely. Internally, I was stunned and confused.
That kind of woke me up. Ever since, I’ve been working on improving my coding skill. During my work on Minecraft, I never really got a chance to try out new things, or play with new tools, but these days I’m really trying to learn new things and pick up better habits as much as I can. And as a result, I’m having even more fun with the programming. At the moment, I’m trying to tame GIT, playing around with MongoDB, trying out some static code analysis tools, and have started working on making my code even more modular and reusable.
The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know.
But. I still stubbornly believe the whole “private members accessed via accessors” thing in java is bullcrap for internal projects. It adds piles of useless boilerplate code for absolutely no gain when you can just right click a field and chose “add setter/getter” if you NEED an accessor in the future.
Point is, SOPA sucks.
No, just kidding. Instead, I will ramble about working in teams.
Some people have asked me why we don’t hire a lot more programmers to work on Minecraft. The answer is that I think that would be an incredibly bad thing to do.. or at least that it WOULD have been an incredibly bad thing to do. One reason why Minecraft has managed to get as much personality as it does it that it’s only been a couple of fairly nerdy game developers working on it.
At first, it was just me, and the game really represented what I thought was fun. Later on, Jens joined in and added his own personality to the game in a way that fit really well with what I had done. Naturally, we took in a lot of external input (especially from players, thank you all so much!), but the end result was still filtered through us, making sure it was personal.
I guess in some sense, this is a big reason of why I like “indie games”. Or games made by small teams, rather. I’m growing more wary of using the term “indie games”, as there are too many definitions of what that means… to me it means a game made for the sake of exploring some game idea, made by a small team that wants to express themselves.. But I digress..
On one hand, I could see how Minecraft has at this point grown to a level where it could use some extra hands to work on it. There’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be done, and a lot of the tone for the game is already set. On the other, I worry that having too many developers on it could water it down. On the third, it could also mean less “quirks” (bugs).. on the fourth, some of these quirks are what give the game a personality. Score: &e0. And so on.
I could argue back and forth forever, but what I really want to do as a developer, is to work on games in tiny, tiny teams. It means less compromise when it comes to design. It means more freedom when it comes to implementation.
At the moment, I am working on a bigger version of my Ludum Dare 22 entry, because I really liked working in that code base. In the relatively near future, I expect to start work on a new, bigger game. I will be the only programmer on that game until the game mechanics are fleshed out and the tone is set. I do feel an enormous pressure to live up to the Minecraft legacy, but I will try not to let that hold me back. I will keep focusing on just making games I want to play.
Happy new year, Internet!
Looks to Internet Community & Fellow Tech Leaders to Destroy Legislation We All Hate
STOCKHOLM, Sweden. (Dec. 23, 2011) - Mojang has never supported SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress.
“Overzealous and vaguely formulated attempts to fight online piracy is of the scariest developments in online policies in recent times, which is why Mojang has been working to help destroy this legislation - but we can clearly do better,” Markus Persson, Mojang’s newly appointed Vacation Expert, said. “It’s very important that all Internet stakeholders work together on this. Getting it right is worth the wait. Mojang will support all efforts to make sure information stays free.”
Mojang and its General Counsel, Oxeye Games, have not in any way worked with federal lawmakers for months to help craft revisions to legislation first introduced some three years ago. As a non-US company, Mojang doesn’t really have any big say about US internal politics, but Persson says he concerned that this law and similar ones will affect their ability to successfully do business online. It is of utmost importance that laws like these are not allowed to affect free speech.
“As a company that is all about innovation, with our own technology and in support of our customers, Mojang is rooted in the idea of free speech and believes 100 percent that the Internet is a key engine for our new economy,” said Persson.
In no changing its position, Mojang remains steadfast in its promise to support security and stability of the Internet. In an effort to eliminate any confusion about its decision not to reverse on SOPA though, Persson has tweeted a silly image of himself in a santa hat.
“Mojang has always fought to preserve free speech and the freedom of information, and will continue to do so in the future,” Jones said. I mean Persson. Not Jones.
I’ve talked about it before, and I’ll talk about it again. Ludum Dare is an amazing thing. It’s basically a recurring (three times per year? Uh. Something like that) competition where you’re supposed to make a game from scratch in 48 hours, and it just happened again this weekend. Everyone starts at the same time when the theme gets announced, and then you try to make an as complete game as possible over the next two days.
The people who submitted games then get to vote on all the other games in a variety of categories, and a few weeks later the winners are announced.
I’ve participated several times before with (not sure about the chronological order of these) Breaking the Tower, Bunny Press, Metagun, The Europa Arcology Incident, and Prelude of the Chambered. The first year, I actually played and voted on ALL the other games submitted, but the competition has slowly grown, and this year there has been over seven hundred games made. That is amazing!
This year I made a game called Minicraft. As usual, I had lots of fun, even if I couldn’t really think of a good game that would fit the theme of “alone”.. I ended up making a zelda-ish top down game with crafting influences from Minecraft.
I’ve never actually won Ludum Dare, nor do I think I should, as there are some seriously talented people participating. A big part of the fun is to know other people are struggling just as hard as you do, and that you get to see what everyone else has made after you finish yours. There really is a great sense of community.
You can see all the games here: www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-22/?action=preview
Rock Paper Shotgun did a nice article trying to sort out what’s been made this last weekend: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/12/19/they-are-all-alone-ludum-dare-picks/
I’ve been avoiding doing any kind of work recently in an attempt to reset my creative batteries. I’ve mostly been playing Zelda. Then I played Hyper Princess Pitch and started playing around with the idea of making a Christmas game myself. Naturally, I started with the title. Santa vs Cthulhu.
The original idea was to make a real time strategy game where you play as either Santa or Cthulhu, building elves and manics, converting houses for your purpose (cheer or ia). But it was hard to pick a setting for it. Santa obviously lives on the north pole, but there aren’t many houses there, and there certainly aren’t any deep oceans for any Ancient Ones to awaken from.
I gave up on the idea, until last night. I got this idea that using the Geoscape from x-com would better fit the scope. Santa would start with a base on the north pole, Cthulhu would start somewhere in the south pacific. They’d both spend time improving their base and recruiting cities. Combat would take place in the RTS game I initially imagined. I got excited about the idea, as it would allow me to make fun of/pay tribute to two games I really loved growing up, UFO: Enemy Unknown and Dune 2. Sadly, the game seemed a bit too complex for me to make in time for Christmas, so I abandoned the idea.
But what if I ditched the RTS bit? Just focus on base building and sending out scouting parties to look for Cthulian infestation or to cheer up a nearby city? Combat would be resolved automatically with a brief combat summary, perhaps. Yes, this seemed like a much more feasible game, and it’d be much more focused as well.
This ended up with me programming the entire night. I found an old textured polygon software renderer I had written a few years ago and rescued it from its project. It ran pretty fast, had support for arbitrary polygons for some reason, and even did z clipping with perspective correct texture mapping. For the planet, I started out with an icosahedron and used the net suggested on the wiki article as the texture map. I subdivided all faces and re-normalized the vertices a few times to make it look a bit rounder, then I found a map of the earth folded out into the same net and traced it into my own format. There are copyright issues with this approach, as tracing something really isn’t original work. I’m not sure how else to get a map that looks familiar..
At about 6 am or so, I had a spinning globe, fully textured, running at some 1000 fps.
I’m pretty sure I won’t actually be able to make this game in time for christmas (Ludum Dare this upcoming weekend will take up a lot of the remaining time, and I definitely want to do that), but I had a great night of programming last night. I really missed being able to dig myself deep into some obscure programming challenge and spend the entire night working on it.
Besides, if doing the game quickly was my primary motivator, I wouldn’t have gone for the fancy polygonal approach. I just would’ve written a simple screen coordinate -> spherical coordinate lookup table thing that maps each pixel to a position on the globe (or to nothing, if it’s outside the globe).
We’re expanding!
Exciting new projects, a very successful first year, and a much bigger new office means we’re going to grow into a slightly larger company. Right now we’re about 12-15 people, depending on how you count, and we want to grow to “a bit larger”.
To apply for a job, go here:
https://docs.google.com/a/mojang.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&pli=1&formkey=dGVqbjRidUw5VFVuYW5QSE93YVdtbnc6MQ#gid=0
(Note that we’re only looking for developers at this point)
Here are the top five reasons you should work at Mojang:
5) We’re less serious than many other companies. We rely on having a pool of talent rather than long discussions, and make decisions very organically and spontaneously.
4) We encourage people at Mojang to speak publicly about what they do and have a personal connection with the players.
3) Tobias Möllstam
2) We have mandatory gaming Friday afternoons. Working after lunch on Fridays is frowned upon.
1) Mojang’s mission statement is “Mojang shall be the most influential indie game development studio on Earth”, and we intend to live up to that. I kid you not.
Some clever people came up with some concepts for LEGO Minecraft kits. We thought it was pretty darn cool and talked to LEGO about it, and now it’s up for on their community site where people can vote for it and show LEGO if they want it or not.
If you do want it to happen, simply go here and click the green “support” button:
http://lego.cuusoo.com/ideas/view/4038
As of yesterday, Jens Bergensten is the new lead developer on Minecraft. He will have the final say in all design decisions, so he will kinda sorta become my boss, I guess. I’ve promised him to not pull rank. ;)
We’ve been working together on Minecraft for a year now, and I’m amazed at how much in synch we two are when it comes to how to design the game. And when we don’t agree, we discuss it and something much better comes out at a result. He’s truly a great person to work with, and I feel very confident handing over the leadership of Minecraft to him.
If you want to contact Jens, he’s on twitter as @jeb_, or you can email him at [email protected]
Personally, I will now rest for a while, then get back to work refreshed and eager. I’ll be helping out with Minecraft, of course, but also starting work on some new project.
Back before the Orange Box, I kept hyping TF2 to all my friends. I had played a lot of TF and TFC back in the day, and I knew TF2 would be the greatest thing ever. My friends humored me and got it on the beta with me. And my god was it awesome. It was awesomer than awesome!
Way later, I went through this period of not really enjoying TF2 as much as I had. After spending hundreds of hours on a game, I guess that’s bound to happen.
A while back, I started playing it a bit now and again to see what was new. And it scared me a bit. The game I remembered with sentries glitched under the floor and sidecrits wasn’t there. Now it was all swords and space guns and engineers protecting spots nobody was playing anywhere near. But something was there. It was still fun.
Then I got invited to play in the third TF2 Mixup (watch it here) with a bunch of famous TF2 personalities. Robin Walker, my third favorite person at Valve, was there, and kept killing me with his super hax. And by golly did I have a great time!
So I kept playing, and I kept having fun. Playing with ez in the other room is lots of fun, and the game seems to for some reason have gotten a lot easier since it went free to play. Ahem. I got the Primeval Warrior after a while, and felt special.
Then I got this:
Hooooly cow. Thank you, Valve.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of medic I get now. Also, spies.
I am never quitting TF2 again, and you should all go buy it right away. How much is it, you ask? It’s FREE! YES!
[edit:]
Some time many years ago, we decided to measure something that has a zero value on a scale where zero isn’t at the zero value. A temperature of no heat at all is -273 and -460 in degrees Celsius and degrees Fahrenheit respectively. This makes no sense. None.
In Kelvin, a total lack of heat is exactly 0 K. This makes sense. The lack of distance is exactly 0 meters. And 0 yards. And 0 parsecs.
So the obvious solution is to either switch everyone over to Kelvin (or Rankine if you’re a hipster), or to change introduce a new measurement for distance that has the zero point at some other value than no distance at all.
I suggest the Flen, based off the human body. 0 Flen is exactly 1.76 meters, because that happens to be my length. 1 Flen is 2.76 meters. -1.76 Flen is 0 meters, or a total lack of distance.
Some measurements in Flen:
Diameter of CD-Rom: -1.64 Flen
Length of Notch: 0 Flen
Length of Jakob: 0.02 Flen
Height of Eiffel Tower: 322.4 Flen
Who’s with me?
After some 45 minutes of sleep and a huge plate of nachos (the Nacho Mama at the Mandalay Bay is very, very good), we went over to the media suite to warm up.
And that’s all I can post. I try to keep this blog somewhat PG13.
I am incredibly tired right now, so this might be a bit short. ;)
Breakfast was at 8 am, being filmed by CNN. People were looking tired, but happy, and me and Jakob had bacon with far too much Tabasco sauce on. Then I went and did an interview with CNN, finishing with playing some Minecraft next to a fan. I went back to signing stuff for two hours.
Then there was the charity lunch. The food was excellent, and everyone there had paid a lot of money that later got donated to the Make A Wish Foundation. I ended up signing even more stuff at that lunch.
After lunch, I did an interview with Machinima, followed by me heading over the backstage area of the closing session thing. I got even more things to sign there, for IGN and something else I forget what it was. The closing session got delayed 20 minutes due to total chaos, but we eventually got on stage and thanked everyone for coming, thanked the sponsors, gave away a huge fake check to Make A Wish, and brought a guy and his girlfriend up on stage for a proposal. She said yes.
And then we were done. We had some beer and champagne, and now we get to rest. Elin and I just ordered room service, and will take a short nap.
Then there’s the party tonight. It’s going to be crazy.
<3
After some seven hours of sleep (nice), we went to the wrong room for breakfast. Confusion started setting in until someone figured it out. Breakfast in the USA apparently consisted of cake bread with peanut butter and jam, and extremely crispy bacon. I am not complaining.
We went to rehearse the opening session, and I got mic:ed up by what I think was CNN, who are filming something about something. I tried to pay attention, but so much was going on, I kinda faked understanding what was happening. There was a big minecraft lever on stage that I had to pull, timed to a snare drum / bass drum kick in a song. I couldn’t pull it too hard, or it would pop out, as it wasn’t actually held in place by anything other than pressure from the material on the sides of it.
We had lunch backstage, I had some refreshing beverages to soothe my nerves, and then fans started filling the room for the opening ceremony. Thousands of them. My personal security guard (provided by the hotel) also arrived. His job is to help me get from place to place when I need to go somewhere without getting mobbed, and to make sure I’m “safe”. Turns out he’s been a cop for many years, so he had awesome authority just by looking at people. He’s done stuff like this for a long time.
The opening ceremony went well. We started with an opening trailer by Hat Films, watched a video by Captain Sparkles, listened to Stuart Platt from Microsoft who showed the Minecraft Xbox 360 trailer (also made by Hat Films), listened to Daniel talk about the iOS version, then we introduced everyone at Mojang. Then Mega64 came on and played their Minecraft 1.0 release funny video type of thing. It was funny :D. I got to be mocked by Rocco, which has been a goal of mine for a long time.
I got a standing ovation when I came on stage. There’s no way to deal with that. Emotions ran wild. Then I did a short talk, then we pulled the lever, and I ran off to watch my sister get married, Vegas style.
After the wedding, we had the Mojang Panel where the Oxeye team talked about Cobalt, the Scrolls team talked about Scrolls, then everyone from Mojang answered questions from the audience. Or rather, Jakob, Mattis, Jens and I answered questions. The rest mostly just sat there. ;)
A quick snack later, we went to the main expo hall and sat down in the signing/taking pictures area, and spent a total of three hours signing stuff as fast as we could. It was absolutely crazy, with the queue leading all the way around the hall, out the doors, and all the way over to the stairs. Since we had to cut the line when we started running out of time, the volunteers handed out tickets for everyone who couldn’t reach the front in time. We’ll have a special signing session just for them today at 11 am.
We ended the night in our common Media Suite, where there was food and drinks. I didn’t last long before leaving for bed.
Then I slept.
I woke up at 3 am after getting about three and a half hours of sleep. I lingered in bed for three hours or so, but never managed to go back to sleep. Too many thoughts, too much jetlag. The sunset was very beautiful from our hotel room. At about 7 am or so, Elin and I called our family members, and we all gathered in our suite before going down to eat breakfast. And let me tell you, breakfast buffets in Vegas are pretty darn awesome.
Then I did some gambling and met some fans. So far I’m up $130, all on slot machines. My plan is to either gamble all of that winning away or stop if I happen to hit $1000. I fully expect to lose it.
Everyone from Mojang met up at noon to go through the convention center. I got lost several times over while doing so, so I don’t actually remember where anything of it was. But it sure was starting to look impressive. Someone told me that Minecraft for iOS had accidentally been released early and that it was the second most grossing app. The original plan was to reveal it as a secret thing during the opening ceremony. A bit later, it was the top grossing app.
I spend 45 minutes streaming the preparations to twitch.tv. I would stream more during the event, but we’ve asked ign to be our exclusive streaming partner, and I don’t want to do anything they’re not ok with. If I see them, I will ask, and perhaps do some more streaming today.
We did a rehearsal press event thing, then the actual press event thing. I did a few interviews that got progressively more silly as the day went on. Most of the Yogscast interview was spent talking about Simon’s mother, and I slapped myself twice during the one with Hat Films.
Then a few of us gathered in our suite again to get some room service, and ended up ordering way too much food. The nachos were awesome. Then I called Carl and cancelled the final thing I was supposed to do that day (record some video with <SECRET>) and fell asleep.
When I woke up, I heard we got a 10/10 review for Minecraft from Eurogamer. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-11-18-minecraft-review
The phone alarm rang at half past seven in the morning. Two hours later we were at Arlanda Airport and met up with the rest of the Mojang Team. We did some last minute shopping (power plug converters and toothpaste), had breakfast, then got on the flight to Heathrow Airport where we bought even more power plug converter thingies.
The second flight went all the way to Las Vegas. I have to say, British Airways has fairly decent airplane food, and the business class seats are amazing. I played some Skyrim on my MacBook Air, but I had turned down the settings so low the game actually became a bit annoying to play. In large indoors areas, the entire far area of the room would unload and just look like a skybox. So I gave up on that and played VVVVVV and Super Meat Boy instead. Luckily, I had brought an XBox 360 controller.
In Vegas, there were limos waiting to drive us to Mandalay Bay. Me and Elin got a really nice corner suite with a 180 degree panorama view of Las Vegas. We got a few free awesome rooms because of the convention, so I made sure to grab a good one for myself. Carl got something called a “presidential suite”, which everyone assumed would be a huge suite with lots of space. Turns out it was way smaller than the one me and Elin got, but we still had the first mojang gathering in Vegas in that room. There was pizza, fries, buffalo wings, dip sauces, and plenty of beverages. Deadmau5 was there and we talked a bit about the party on Saturday, which is going to be incredibly awesome.
Danny Baranowsky and Petri Purho stopped by, and Kyle Whatshisface from J!NX decided to tackle hug me while I was just barely able to stay awake. That was about my cue to head back to the hotel room and try to get some sleep. ;)
It’s not 3:30 am, and the jetlag is playing with me. I’ve never been more awake in my entire life.
Also, please vote for whatever game you think is the best one here: http://www.spike.com/events/video-game-awards-2011-nominees/voting/best-pc-game ;D
(First of all, sorry about the masturbation joke in my last post. It’s currently my favorite joke. :D)
It’s 10 pm. In 10.5 hours, we will leave for Arlanda Airport. Soon thereafter, we will fly to Las Vegas!
The last few weeks have been incredibly stressful and emotional in many ways, and I feel so relieved to finally have a finished version of Minecraft to release to the world on Friday. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop working on Minecraft! We’ll keep adding to the game just as we have so far, and we have many exciting plans for the next year.. some of these will be announced fairly soon.
One thing that kind of fell between chairs is the mod support.. Sorry about that, I take full responsibility for letting that get forgotten about. But when it comes to the new launcher, it got folded into a new exciting project I won’t talk about yet.
But back to Minecon! For me personally, it’s going to be three full days of chaos and fans, which will probably leave me extremely tired. Then there’s a big party with a huge celebrity act playing. And then I get to relax. I plan on playing a LOT of games this winter.. Battlefield 3, Saints Row The Third, Diablo 3, Skyward Sword, and biggest of all, Skyrim.
Skyrim, SkyrimSkyrim Skyrim Skyrim SkyrimSkyrimSkyrim. Skyrim.
I visited my doctor last week, and he told me I had to stop masturbating. I asked him why, surely it’s not dangerous. He said it was distracting him.
A normal project for me goes through three stages. I will summarize and review them because I’m waiting for a very slow script to finish and have nothing better to do! :D
Inspiration!
Ah! A new idea! I think I know how I could do an awesome thing, or there’s a new aspect I want to try with an existing feature. Development speed is amazingly high and new ideas get thrown around. Some of it might not be perfect, and there’s a significant risk of abandoning the project at this stage.
Fun: 5/5
Usefulness: 2/5
Fulfillment: 5/5
Productivity: 4/5
Motivation!
After the initial stage of inspiration, the project moves into the motivation driven phase. Features get tweaked and polished, and the overall design gets a final overhaul. Some boring things get pushed up until later, if possible.
Fun: 3/5
Usefulness: 3/5
Fulfillment: 3/5
Productivity: 5/5
Stress!
Suddenly I realize I need to finish the feature! Doubt sets in, and some deadline starts looming. Is it good enough? Is it even usable? Productivity drops suddenly, and the major motivator becomes just getting it done before the deadline. This usually leads to last minute work. Despite this, much of the work ends up being actually very good.
Fun: 1/5
Usefulness: 3/5
Fulfillment: 2/5
Productivity: 1/5
Abandonment!
Eventually, the project is considered “good enough”, or the deadline passes, and whatever is there will just have to serve as the final version. Sure, I could spend infinitely more time working on it, but new projects are either deemed more important, or some new inspiration sets in. The project is wrapped up and released.
Fun: 3/5
Usefulness: 5/5
Fulfillment: 4/5
Productivity: 3/5
Yes, I’m talking about the ender dragon fight. ;)
Next week is MineCon week. That means we’ll release the full version of Minecraft (which will be called “Minecraft”, and have a version number of 1.0. The current version is “Minecraft Beta”). We’ll keep working on Minecraft for a long time after the full release, but it’s a huge milestone.
That milestone also means people might start reviewing the game. There have been a few reviews already, but I have a feeling most people are waiting for the full release.
This makes me nervous.
It does feel like the game has already proven itself. Lots of people play the game, and we receive a lot of friendly and positive emails from players. We’ve won several amazing awards, so several people in the industry seems to enjoy what we’ve done.
Now it’s just the press left.
It’s a bit weird, but gaming scores have become so big and bloated, I can’t help but feel like I would be disappointed with a score that would be a great score for something like a movie or a music album. And even if the score means relatively little compared to the players and the awards, it’s a distinct number people will use to compare the game to other games.
But what REALLY makes me nervous is the fact that I’m going to have to do at least some public speaking at MineCon. I’m fine with meeting fans and signing stuff, and even with having my picture taken, but standing on stage and trying to get a point across really terrifies me.
Yep. It’s sold out. Wow. :D
Ok, so.. For a long time, I’ve claimed that obviously the egg came before the chicken, as the first chicken had to be hatched from something.
We had a discussion about it today at work, and Jens contested that claim. So now I’ve revised my position.
Chicken can lay eggs without them being fertilized. This means the eggs are made up of non-genetically-mixed material, and that the fertilization alters the contents of the eggs (the thing that gets hatched).
This means that some kind of proto-chicken got fertilized, laid a proto-chicken egg that contained a mutated offspring that we would today call a chicken.
So obviously, the chicken came first. QEFD.
Ok, that headline it a bit overly inflammatory. While I am sceptical of the free to play trend, what I hate is the wording “free to play”.
The reason some people are moving to this area is that free to play showed up in the “social gaming” segment (facebook) and made a few people (zynga) very rich. It’s been tried in other genres in other markets with decent success. By “success”, I mean “it’s profitable”. The reason anyone switches to “free to play” is to make more money. You get your players hooked on your game, and then you try to monetize them. The idea is to find a model where there basically is no cap on how much the player can spend, then try to encourage players to spend more and more money. Various psyhological traps like abusing the sense of sunk costs get exploited, and eventually you end up with a game that’s designed more like a slot machine than half-life 2.
So instead of calling it “free to play”, we should call it “as expensive as you want it to be” or something.
I do not mind paying for games after the purchase. I like customizing my character, or getting a few extra levels (DX HR:Missing Link, woo!), or even paying a subscription cost for something with running costs.
But let’s get one thing clear: people who think “free to play” is a great future are mostly game developers, not game players.
I’ll go play some team fortress 2 now until dota 2 is released. I can’t wait!! =D
Ok, so I missed out on the Beta, but everything I’ve seen looks amazingly fun. Like ridiculously so. Even the bugged out crawling animations look hilarious.
While I think some serious competition to Steam is a good thing for everyone involved, especially the customers, I’m a bit skeptical of Origin. That said, I’d GLADLY start using it just to be able to play Battlefield 3.
Heck, I’d gladly gnaw my own feet off to be able to play Battlefield 3.
One year ago, we started Mojang. Back then, Minecraft had sold between half a million and one million copies, and now we’re up to almost four million copies sold, we’re expanding to two new platforms, and we’re getting good progress done with our new game. In one month, we’re going to Las Vegas to celebrate the full release of Minecraft with our fans. And we’re getting sued by one of my favorite game developers.
I started working on Minecraft in the summer of 2009, starting with a top-down isometric mining game. The elevator pitch for the game was “Dwarf Fortress meets Rollercoaster Tycoon meets Dungeon Keeper”. It was an interesting game for sure that I’d still like to see someone make, but then I played a game called Infiniminer and realized the first person perspective with blocky graphics worked really well and started prototyping it. The game went from being about controlling a team of characters to being a single player first person experience, with a focus on resource gathering and a somewhat coherent fantasy setting that would provide hopefully constant challenges and things to do.
After a little more than half a year of working on the game, people started talking about it and paying attention to it, so I was able to quit my day job and focus on it full time. I got flown out to Seattle to talk to Valve (and Bungie, as a bonus! :D). Valve’s one of the places I’d absolutely love to work at, the people are really nice and creative, and their new offices are amazingly nerd friendly. But I decided to instead focus on doing my own thing, called Jakob, and told him to quit his job.
Daniel joined, then Carl, then me and Jakob took a short field trip to Uppsala to meet with Junkboy, then Daniel suggested Jens, and all of the sudden we’re 12 people in the office, with three more signed up. We’re looking for a bigger office now. Fun!
We’re officially one year old now, and things are more fun than ever. :D Thank you, everyone working at Mojang. You may miss morning meetings sometimes, and some of you have horrible taste in music, but I love you all! And, of course, none of this would’ve been possible without the players and the fans, so thank you, person reading this!
Also, we’ve won a big pile of awards. ;-D
The adventure update is going great! We’re adding features and cramming in content, and then started feature creeping and content creeping. What we’ve got on our hands now is somewhere in between a finished Adventure Mode update and a version of the game we’d be proud to call just “Minecraft”. Not “Minecraft Beta” or “Minecraft Alpha”, but just plain and simple “Minecraft”.
And we’re going to release that version of the game live on stage in Vegas at MineCon! Woooo!
Up until then, instead of trying to squeeze in another real release, we’re going to do weekly (or so) pre releases, aimed at advanced players. We release these via twitter, so make sure to follow me (@notch) and Jens (@jeb_) if you’re interested in those.
Also, we’re finally adding a dragon.
I just saw this:
http://kotaku.com/5846111/mojang-v-bethesda-or-i-hate-it-when-mommy-and-daddy-fight
I feel the need to clarify a couple of things:
We realized we should apply for the trademark “Minecraft” to protect our brand. When doing so, we also sent in an application for “Scrolls”. When Bethesda contacted us, we offered both to change the name to “Scrolls: <some subtitle>” and to give up the trademark.
They refused on both counts.
Whatever reason they have for suing us, it’s not a fear of us having a trademark on the word “Scrolls”, as we’ve offered to give that up.
There are many games like this (captive, hired guns, ishar, might and magic, wizardry, most of the gold box games, and so on), but these are the games all capture a certain common theme and feeling in a way that hasn’t really been done before or since.
Dungeon Master (1987)
A fairly straight forward first person dungeon crawler where going deeper means getting closer to your goal. Gameplay consists of pushing buttons, sidestepping monsters and drinking potions.
Eye of the Beholder (1991)
A fairly straight forward first person dungeon crawler where going deeper means getting closer to your goal. Gameplay consists of pushing buttons, sidestepping monsters and drinking potions.
Eye of the Beholder II - The Legend of Darkmoon (1992)
An evolved version of the original. This time you have to explore different branches and return to the central hub. The boss fight is epic, and the graphics are much better this time around.
Dungeon Master II - The Legend of Skullkeep (1993)
An evolved version of the original. This time you have to explore different branches and return to the central hub. The boss fight is epic, and the graphics are much better this time around.
Eye of the Beholder III - Assault on Myth Drannor (1993)
More of the same, except this time it isn’t fun. The charm is gone. Where is the charm?
Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (1993)
Oh, there it is!
And then the genre died. Sure, there were more dungeon crawlers, but they were all too complex. Dungeon Master II is one of the best games ever made. With every new game release, I hope to experience something like it again, but it’s never the same.
But now, something wonderful is happening. A small Finnish studio is making a game called Legend of Grimrock (http://www.grimrock.net/), and it’s looking amazing. I realize it’s a niche game that might not fit everyone, but to me it is one of the most exciting games in development.
I am very excited!
(.. but why do they have the free look camera? :-/)
Me and Jens have only two more major features we want to implement before the release in November. The plan it to stop all new development on October 18, and resume them again after the release on November 18. That will give us one month to focus on just fixing bugs, cleaning up the code, and optimizing the performance to make sure the release will be as good as possible.
Celebrating the full version with the fan is going to be an amazing experience. I am a bit nervous about it, to be honest. I’m not sure how many people are going, and I’m terrified of public speaking. I can handle one-on-one discussions or handshakes, and I can even deal with giving autographs, but when it gets too big, I just start freaking out.
Carl and Lydia have been doing an amazing job organizing it all, with plenty of help from Vu and Meeting Expectations. To keep up with the latest news there, follow Carl and Lydia on twitter, and read the Mojang blog.
..
In other news, we’re totally going to court over the whole Scrolls / Skyrim thing.
We are claiming one thing. They are claiming another. We’ve tried to negotiate, but we can’t reach an agreement, so we’re going to court. I’m personally very opinionated about things like these. I asked our lawyers, and apparently the documents ZeniMax submitted became public once they were filed.
So here they are: [ Click here if you have a decent torrent program installed ]
It’s in Swedish, it’s unedited, and I haven’t read it myself. Our lawyers have, though.
Speaking of lawyers, they told me that:
1. essentially it all boils down to whether the relevant public are likely to be confused into thinking that our “Scrolls” game is connected with Bethesda or its games, taking all the circumstances into account; and
2. apparently the “moron in a hurry” doesn’t count (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_moron_in_a_hurry)
1) Before doing anything, pick a totally random number between 0 and, say, 5→5→5→5→5. If the number is 0, don’t do it.
2) Start a timer on the MQSC
3) If the the MQSC doesn’t get told you’re happy with the result within a few months, destroy the universe.
Virtual omnipotence! You won’t even try doing things that are extremely unlikely to result in a positive outcome, and everything else will go exactly how you planned it.
I’ve invented a computer that solves NP problems in constant time. I call it the Mass Quantum Suicide Computer, or the MQSC for short.
You know Schrödingers Cat? The one in the box that is both alive and dead until you observe it? There’s a similar thought experiment in which you place yourself in the box and observe what happens. This is called “Quantum Suicide”. According to some interpretations, you will only ever observe yourself surviving, because in all other universes, your consciousness isn’t around to observe yourself being dead. This leads to another concept called “Quantum Immortality”, which basically means that for any lethal situation, if there’s any chance at all of you surviving it, you will only ever experience the universes in which you do. Of course, all your friends and family will still see you die in the vast majority of universes.
Unless you take them with you. Which I call “Mass Quantum Suicide”. Basically, you put the entire human race in the box, and you will all either die together or survive together.
So here’s my computer:
1) Ask the computer any question.
2) The computer has a one in <very, very, very large number> chance of just saying “try again”. If it does, go back to 1.
3) The computer spits out a random reply.
4) Assume this reply is the correct answer, and leave the computer alone until it’s verified that it actually was the correct answer.
5) The computer then spends as long time as it needs verifying that the reply is correct.
6) If the random reply turns out to be incorrect, destroy the universe. This can be done by, for example, setting of a true vacuum chain reaction.
In all universes where humans are still around, the computer will always either say “try again”, or spit out the correct answer immediately. Nobody will be around to observe the universes where it guesses wrong.
This computer works great for NP problems which are quick to verify that you have the correct answer for, as you don’t have to leave the computer alone for very long in between asking it a question.
[EDIT:]
I thought this was an original idea, but it’s been done before:
http://www.mathnews.uwaterloo.ca/Issues/mn11103/QuantumBogoSort.php
Ah well. :D
Is NP in P?
No.
Why is there so much water on earth?
Byproduct of early life.
Do magnetic monopoles exist?
No.
What is the meaning of life?
There is none.
How did Indy get to the submarine bay?
He held on to the submarine, which never submerged.
Does the Collatz conjecture hold for all integers?
Yes.
Well, that was easy. NEXT!
We released Minecraft Beta 1.8! It’s the first half of the Adventure Update, with the remainder coming eventually!
Looking around the office, everyone appears to be keeping busy. Jens is working on some content for the Nether, Daniel and Jakob are trying to finish up an internal Scrolls demo for tomorrow, I’m working on Snow biomes, Tobias is rubbing his temples and cursing (which is normal behavior for web developers), Daniel is talking to someone in the hallway, and Mattis is hunched over a tablet. I can’t see the rest of the team from here.
I think we may have hired someone to do economics and accounting and all that. That would be neat.
I’ve received some questions about what the status of the Bethesda lawsuit thing is. I don’t have much news, but I can try to summarize the recent events in a colorful way:
Lawyers have been sending papers back and forth, threatening each other with deadlines and court dates. “Why don’t we settle this in a mature way?”, one party asks the other. “Your MOTHER settles things in mature ways”, the other party cleverly retorts, “because of her age.”
Last thing I heard, we were a couple of weeks past a “super seriously, we will sue you for real this time” deadline, and letters are still being sent back and forth.
In other news, here’s a list of games I’ve been playing recently, and my thoughts on them:
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Charmingly retro, with a totally rubbish tranq sniper rifle. Unfair boss fights, fun level layout. The level up perks are kind of uninteresting, but it’s still a lot of fun. Inventory management feels very Resident Evil 4, for good and for bad.
[edit: This makes it sound like I don’t like the game! That is incorrect. I love it!!]
Legends of Yore
I’m just getting started playing this more seriously. It’s a low res graphical roguelike made by one guy who I happen to know. Available on both phone types and on pc. I haven’t gotten deep into it yet, but it seems to have everything I want.
The Binding of Isaac
I got sneak peeks of this game, and it’s shaping up nicely. It’s a very lightweight action roguelike with plenty of dark humor and zelda references. Danny B’s done a great job on the soundtrack again, even if it makes me a bit depressed.
Diablo III Beta
No, just kidding, I didn’t get in. :(
We’re quite bad at keeping track of who does what when because of whom, so we got a consultant to help us set up some tracking and metrics and stuff. The idea being that if we know how people use our websites, we can improve it more efficiently.
He created a nifty script for generating short urls for when we link to our websites, so the clicks can be measured and analyzed, and figure out which channels and which campaigns have the best impact. I have no idea how it works, I’m assuming magic.
But it sure is fancy looking.. so I thought I’d test it, with your help.
Instructions:
1) Read ONE of the sentences below, chosen randomly.
2) Do not read the other.
3) Click the link after the sentence you chose.
4) Carry on as normal.
Sentence 1:
This is not reverse psychology -> http://bit.ly/oueqOE
Sentence 2:
You should buy two gift codes, for science -> http://bit.ly/n78hxD
Game development is fun. There’s programming, design, testing and just plain good old silliness. Here’s a brief snapshot - a retelling of what I did this weekend!
I was putting in a few extra hours on Minecraft this weekend, refactoring code so biomes could directly decorate the terrain themselves rather than having the terrain check the biomes manually. That type of work is mostly just busy work, so it wasn’t very interesting from a design perspective, but it was very rewarding form a programming perspective. Things were starting to fall into place, and biomes became much “cleaner”.
One of the results of that was the first draft of a swamp biome, which I posted a screenshot of. I got crazy amounts of great feedback on how to make it look swampier (it kinda looks like a happy grove at the moment), and almost all of them are entirely doable by only changing the SwampBiome.java class. Feels good!
While testing the biome code, I started running out of food in the game and started hunting animals. Cows would just stand there, looking at me as I mashed them over and over to get their precious loot, so I figured I’d just make that mechanic a bit more fun. Four lines of code later, and animals now flee randomly after taking damage. Hunting animals suddenly became a lot more fun and morally questionable as pigs would storm off grunting and chicken (or whatever the heck they are) would jump into ravines. But the real fun came later on.
Someone tweeted me about a joking campaign to add 3d modeled snouts to the pigs in Minecraft, so I did. While doing so, I groaned at how the Cube class has an “addBox” method that actually means “replaceBox”, and how it really should be a “Shape” class with an “addBox” method that actually does what it says. Right now every box in a model has to be individually animated to match the part it’s attached to, and there’s no grouping or hierarcy. This is the reason why the horns on the cows are in the wrong location sometimes. I didn’t fix the code for this, as I was running out of weekend, but I made a mental note to fix it asap.
Reddit loved my pic of a pig with a 3d snout. I got sooo much precious link karma.
Back to doing some further testing. I was exploring a forest biome, hit upon a river cutting through it, and walked over a small hill. On the other side, a wolf was chasing a sheep, but the sheep was running away. I didn’t have this in mind when I wrote the code to make mobs flee, but it ended up giving me an unexpected experience of having some kind of echo system of competing behaviors in various animals, and it just felt.. nice. It made me realize we should explore more mob to mob interactions, and have more chaotic competing behavior.
I’m doing a high priority secret project this week (a prototype for a future possible project), but I already have at least three things I want to work on as soon as I get back on Minecraft work next week.
The reason it’s still fun is you. The community. Thank you. <3
One early summer morning, Carl was on vacation and I was checking my email. Lydia, who was organizing the flights to PAX and such, had emailed all of us, asking what kind of food we wanted on the flight. She listed all the options, and one of them was “Bland”.
That amused me immensely. It’s like having an option that says “over cooked” or “a bit on the salty side, isn’t it?”. So naturally, after saying what me and Elin would prefer to eat, I added that Carl wants bland food. He’s a bland food type of guy after all.
Lydia, who didn’t pick up on the humor, went ahead and ordered that, and everybody forgot about it.
Lunch time on the flight to Seattle. It’s about an 11 hour flight or so. The stewardess told Carl he was getting his “special” food, then got served a tiny portion of celery and some salad.
Thing is, Carl doesn’t like bland food at all! Quite the contrary, he likes food with flavor, and decent portions of it to boot.
We all had a big laugh about it. So much fun. Then he forgot to change his order back to regular food in time for the flight back. ;D
So.. if you ever have dinner with Carl, remember that he likes BLAND food.
At PAX, I got asked why we’re not on Steam with Minecraft, and I had to answer the question straight out for the first time. So I’ll repeat what I said on here, because openess is awesome.
Steam is the best digital distribution platform I’ve ever seen. I’ve spent incredible amounts of money on it, and I own a crazy amount of games on it. It runs great, offers great services like that shift+tab stuff, and it remembers my credit card details so there’s no barrier for me when I want to buy a game. The only downside I can think of is that offline mode is a bit flimsy, and that the game list is sometimes full off DLC releases for stuff I don’t even own, and those are some tiny complaints!
But..
Being on Steam limits a lot of what we’re allowed to do with the game, and how we’re allowed to talk to our users. We (probably?) wouldn’t be able to, say, sell capes or have a map market place on minecraft.net that works with steam customers in a way that keeps Valve happy. It would effectively split the Minecraft community into two parts, where only some of the players can access all of the weird content we want to add to the game.
We are talking to Valve about this, but I definitely understand their reasons for wanting to control their platform. There’s a certain inherent incompatibility between what we want to do and what they want to do.
So there’s no big argument, we just don’t want to limit what we can do with Minecraft. Also, Steam is awesome. Much more awesome than certain other digital distribution platforms that we would NOT want to release Minecraft on.
