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  • 2009 - Minecraft - Analysis of the game itself, as opposed to the story of its creation.

 

 



 


  • Major question: What exactly is it that makes a game "accessible"? I want to have a comprehensive list of the attributes.

 

 



Timeline of his success

  • 2003 - Notch and a friend release a Beta for a complicated open-world sandbox game called "Wurm Online".
    • "All items are made from materials from the world: wood cut from trees, rocks and metal mined from tunnels, and so forth. Wurm allows players to terraform the land, raising, flattening, and lowering tiles using shovels. Players can also mine underground and make vast caverns, climb mountains, build keeps and cities, and form new kingdoms (on some servers)." (Source)

    • "The first time I tried out Wurm Online, it was at the suggestion of Beau Hindman, who found out that I was a lover of all things sandbox. I jumped into the game with no tutorial and zero guidance, and I hated it."- Shawn Schuster, a Massively.com journalist. (Source)

  • 2005(?) - Notch starts working for King.com, makers of the simple-to-learn and hugely-successful game Candy Crush.
  • 2006 - Wurm Online is released.
  • 2007 - Notch leaves the company developing Wurm Online.
  • 2009(?) - Notch quits his job with King.com.
  • 2009.04 - Infiniminer is released.
  • 2009.05 - Notch releases a simple-to-learn open-world sandbox game called "Minecraft".
    • Minecraft looks like what you would expect to see if Wurm Online and Candy Crush had a baby.
  • 2009.05-06 - Over the next month, the players and Notch comments comment repeatedly in the forumthread, keeping Minecraft at the top of the forum.
  • 2009.10 - Notch publishes a blog post in which he describes his "heavy focus on accessibility". (Source)

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    • Expand

      While looking through some project folders, I found an old protype of a game that never quite became anything. Kinda.

      It was called “RubyDung” (for various reasons), and was supposed to be a base building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with a heavy focus on accessibility. Here are the screenshots from that game:
      http://www.mojang.com/notch/misc/rubydung/1.jpg
      http://www.mojang.com/notch/misc/rubydung/2.jpg
      http://www.mojang.com/notch/misc/rubydung/3.jpg
      http://www.mojang.com/notch/misc/rubydung/4.jpg
      http://www.mojang.com/notch/misc/rubydung/5.jpg

      Around this time, I was also playing around with the idea of making a zombie game with a graphics engine similar to GTA: Chinatown Wars. I made my own fully 3d texture mapper from scratch for the first time in my life (I had only done 2.5d texture mappers up until this point). The idea was kinda vaguely to make a spiritual sequel to Left 4k Dead.

      It looked a little something like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Vmy-ZNbGXE

      As the RubyDung engine got more advanced, I started thinking about adding a first person view for following your minions around, kinda like in Dungeon Keeper. It worked ok, but the graphics got very pixellated and distorted, so I left it out.

      But then I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do. I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it flawed. Building was fun, but there wasn’t enough variation, and the big red/blue blocks were pretty horrible. I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well, so I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style, reusing some art and code (although not as much as you’d think) from RubyDung, and came up with this:
      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k

      The response was very positive, and I was blown away at how good the framerate, and how well it ran in a browser, so I decided to go for it. I knew I didn’t want the flat sprite look of enemies that Infiniminer had, but I also knew I wasn’t a good enough artist to make anything that looked really good. Additionally, realistic looking models would clash horribly with the terrain.

      Then I realized I had already made fairly cool looking player models when i did ZombieTown, so I spend some time porting them to OpenGL, and ended up with this:
      http://www.mojang.com/notch/minecraft/screen0.jpg

      And that’s where we are now.


 


  • 2010.12.02 - indiepubgames.com - Et Tu, Minecraft?
    • TIGSource forum discussion
    • 2010.12.02 - Reddit discussion of the indiepub article - What Minecraft and Farmville have in common
    • A very interesting article. 


    • consider a common experience in the game: you’re deep underground, digging a tunnel, hoping to find something valuable. And for every block you hack away, you have some small, pre-randomized chance of uncovering something valuable. Re-read that, and let the horror dawn on you: even in Minecraft, the messiah of indie games, there’s a slot machine hidden in the core mechanics!

      I’ve felt its hypnotizing allure firsthand. I spend hours chipping away with a pickaxe, happy to find resources that I’ll never use and thrilled to discover ore that’s both extremely rare and *explicitly useless*. The best find is diamond, which will let me play the slot machine even faster. Awesome! And if I grind for long enough, I get to customize the game world. Sounds almost like Farmville!

      there's undeniably some aspects of grinding and gambling, and I find it fascinating that a game that I so love can contain design techniques that I so loathe. I’m left wondering: what would happen if we removed the time sinks and the slot machines? Could Minecraft be made pure?

      We can already get a taste of that with the game’s Creative mode, in which the player gets an infinite pile of every resource and is set loose to build whatever he or she wants. There’s no need to spend time digging, so you escape the need to gamble for the good stuff. And people have fun with Creative mode! But not as much fun, usually. I played primarily in the default mode. My castle is a pretty significant piece of work (or at least a ridiculous time investment), built from tens of thousands of blocks lovingly collected one by one. Any idiot could build that castle on Creative mode, I snort derisively, but it takes an especially *dedicated* idiot to build it under default settings. And for some reason, the fact that I spent (read: wasted) so much time on that castle makes it more special to me.

 


Notch's Twitch.tv casts
http://www.twitch.tv/notch/profile/past_broadcasts 




2015.04.01 - Daily Mail - Revealed, tragic past of the man who built Minecraft
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... rties.html

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