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[ZoddGutts]

Making smaller games and being a publisher of indies would be a good choice for them. Though still would like to see them help fund Psychonauts 2. The money alone their making from the Xbox version would fund it in one month.

 

[legacyzero]

So uhhhh. Minecraft 2, I guess??

 

[Drazgul]

You owe me, Notch. You owe me.

 

[soxinthebox]

Aw that sucks. It did seem too big for him to complete. After minecraft it seemed like he wanted to do an equally big and ground breaking game that could top its success, and why not? He had all the money and time in the world to do it but that's a recipe for disaster. Hopefully the fan effort can translate the basic concepts into a fun game.

The core of the game was the programmable computer idea. You can program the computer to do whatever in your spaceship. Make a clock, code and play original games, setup your own security system for accessing the computer etc. Whatever a real computer could do. The computer works in conjunction with all of the on board spaceship electronics so you can control the thrusters, air supply, guns, communication etc. With these tools you go around the universe to scavenge more parts to upgrade your ship and computer so you can do more. While adventuring there are other human players doing the exact same thing, so you can fight to see who's setup is better, hack/get hacked, or maybe work together, trade, whatever. This is fucking ambitious and I'd love to play it someday.

Hopefully more developers are inspired by this stylized low poly low res texture look. It looks great.

And good luck to Notch in whatever he does next.

That art style looks awesome! Hope someone picks it up and runs with it.

 

[Chinner]

seems like hes making sweet money from minecraft on xbox , but tis a shame anyway/

 

[Dipswitch]

Sounds like he has an ounce of common sense and knows when to fold. Countless other studios have not acted nearly as smart.

Mind you, most other developers also don't own an IP that prints money.

 

[Data West]

Sounds like he has an ounce of common sense and knows when to fold. Countless other studios have not acted nearly as smart.

Mind you, most other developers also don't own an IP that prints money.

Which is what makes it such a bummer to play it so safe.

 

[MasonOfWords]

Anyone enticed by this should probably check out the X games, in particular X3. You can directly control ships, dogfight, pirate, etc., but you can also build stations that produce and trade in goods, automate ship behavior to support those stations. It is single-player only, but the AI behavior is complex enough to be very interesting.

To be honest, 0x10c always looked kind of bad. Its only publicly-discussed gimmick, the virtual machine, doesn't seem terribly interesting for very long. At least, I never heard any use cases for it which couldn't be "solved".

I think a good analog for a lot of people would be FFXII, where gambits were cool for a few hours but ignored once you achieved a sufficiently okay setup. 0x10c would have a solid design challenge, if it wanted to keep its scripting relevant without being annoying.

Also, not a fan of the art I've seen. Low-res textured 3D games belong to a dark age for a reason. Minecraft's cubes make technical sense, but I can't see a reason to make this game look this bad, especially given the resources that Mojang has access to.

"X3 + EVE" is a good elevator pitch, but a scary project. Still, it is sad to see any ambitious project get shelved.

 

[gofreak]

Aw :/

Maybe if this is a case of 'second album' pressure, he should think about developing and releasing something under a psuedonym?

Maybe it was just design problems with the game though.

 

[Metalmurphy]

He'll just make Minecraft 2 after realizing he can't make anything else.

 

[Carcetti]

Scrolls is pretty awesome guys.

But they're just Scrolls, I mean how can they compare to Elder Scrolls? Younger scrolls aren't just as exciting or visceral.

 

[DXB-KNIGHT]

He just needs to forget that Minecraft exists just to avoid the pressure of matching the previous success and just focus on doing a fun game even if it isn't as successful as Minecraft.

 

[Acosta]

Huge letdown, I was really looking for it... Good thing we have other space sandbox incoming but that concept was pretty unique.

 

[creyas]

Aww, a real shame. All i had heard from it was great.

 

[CambriaRising]

Meanwhile he seems completely obvious to the part of his company that manages minecraft. Signing exclusive deals and refusing to update the mobile game as it sells more and more broken copies to consumers.

Edit: oh hey, they just unbroke the login system 4 days ago.

 

[KKRT00]

He'll just make Minecraft 2 after realizing he can't make anything else.

Too late. With Everquest Next, Starforge, 7 day to die, TUG and many others it will be hard to make Minecraft 2.

 

[Seanspeed]

I haven't touched the minecraft scene in a while, but seriously the game isn't worth more than $15 and this is from someone who bought it back when it was a sandbox with lofty goals.

Thanks for letting us people who gladly spent 100+ plus hours playing and still play know that it wasn't actually worth the money we paid for it. Seriously, what would we do without people like you, saving us from our ignorance?

 

[PapaJustify]

Still don't like Notch's attitude - being all outspoken about Microsofts supposed "walled garden" policies for Windows 8 and meanwhile making Minecraft exclusive to Xbox on consoles.

But I can see that it puts him under pressure, feeling forced to come with the next big hit after Minecraft. He said as much in the Minecraft documentary already, so I am not at all surprised.

 

[Hrothgar]

It's not like he has time to make games when he is on holiday every other week.


When he announced that game I knew he was never going to finish it, too ambitious a project for him.

 

[SJRB]

"Creative block", is this a joke? Then hire a creative director, for fucks sake.


Better play it safe and re-release Minecraft on Xbone.

 

[GavinGT]

I haven't touched the minecraft scene in a while, but seriously the game isn't worth more than $15 and this is from someone who bought it back when it was a sandbox with lofty goals.

I made a massive arcade and casino using logic gates, then had my friends visit and play around with everything. It took me weeks to build and it was a blast all the way through. I definitely got my money's worth, and it even allowed me to brush up on my digital design skills.

 

[big_z]

what notch needs to do is talk to the bitcoin people and take mining craft to a whole new level.

 

[spats]

But i have a free copy

Me too, this is a total bummer. : (

 

[missile]

Thanks for the DCPU-16 specs, Notch!

I think I can put it to good use. Already did a little 3d graphics engine
for it;

 

[Hermii]

Stop trying to top minecraft thats impossible. Just continue to make fun little modifiable games. It is the countless user mods and the community that make minecraft what it is, not the game in itself.

 

[Kouriozan]

Yeah I had the feeling that making a game like that would be too much for them.
Good luck for his next project.

 

[Krilekk]

Hopefully more developers are inspired by this stylized low poly low res texture look. It looks great.

And good luck to Notch in whatever he does next.

That's developer art. Any game looks like that at the beginning.

 

[Toma]

Surprise! I was saying he wont ever finish this game a while ago, not surprising at all he finally dropped it after stating multiple times that he wasnt confident and satisfied with the direction the game was heading.

 

[Haunted]

Shame.

I don't think Notch is directly involved with Scrolls' development so I'm curious to see what he's working on now (if he's making another game).

I am also dubious about this notion of the "gameplay" living onwards since we never got one iota of a peek at said gameplay.

Well, we do have some footage of Notch roaming around in first person on a spaceship (a test map, basically), showing off the lighting, some combat against low poly versions of the TF2 Soldier (lol) and some of the coding.

 

[Morokh]

Scrolls is pretty awesome guys.

It doesn't sell or create any buzz on the same level that Minecraft so it doesn't exist

GAF logic !



Also what's the point of a Minecraft 2 when they still keep on updating the first with new stuff regularly ? Next update will add and completely revamp the biome system as it seems.

 

[Haunted]

Making smaller games and being a publisher of indies would be a good choice for them. Though still would like to see them help fund Psychonauts 2. The money alone their making from the Xbox version would fund it in one month.

That's basically what they've been doing as Mojang with Scrolls and Cobalt. Along with a small team being responsible for continuously updating Minecraft.

This was just Notch's project, doing his solo programming thing.

 

[Nibel]

Way too ambitious - he shouldn't have tried to include every feature from the get-go but choosen the Minecraft model instead: release something that kind of works and add features with patches

 

[Seanspeed]

Why do people think it has to be a matter of the game being too ambitious? When he says they've hit a creative block, why is that so hard to believe? :/

 

[Arkanius]

I knew this would happen right at the start when he said "You will have a ship". Ok that's fine many games have space ships.
"It will have a programable computer" It's totally do-able.
"You will be able to program everything in your spaceship" Uh this is going to rise the complexity up to a Notch (snort)
"You will be able to visit planets and do stuff online" Yeah bullshit detector is ringing already. Not even EVE managed to do that.

I basically imagined something with a fleshed out computer, a very crappy spaceship, and ME1 random planets with nothing to do. I think the concept was way way too ambitious for a one man team to do.

 

[missile]

For all those who follow an interest in using the DCPU-16 specs in their
own games / whatever.

About the copyright and license of the DCPU-16 specs;
xNotch@reddit: "Anyone can use it. There's no license anywhere, but it's just
a spec anyway. Can't really copyright that. ".

 

[The-Bean]

Anybody interested in 0x10c should check out Rodina.

At a Glance
Rodina is a game where you seamlessly explore a solar system. Fly your spaceship from planet to moon to asteroid with no loading screens or warp doors. Explore these huge, procedurally-generated landscapes on foot. Customize your ship’s living spaces to suite your tastes. Get into dogfights with alien spaceships in order to secure control of valuable resources and property.

Rodina is being developed by a one-man team on a small budget. It’s an ambitious project, and one way of making the project more realistic is by starting with a modest game and growing from there. The first version of the game will be very simple, and if it is successful, production will continue and features will be added. Though the initial version of the game will be modest in scope, the possibilities are endless and we hope to develop Rodina into the game described below.

Long-Term Features:

• Explore Space, Inside and Out
  In Rodina, you can explore the world both inside of a ship and outside of one. You will find yourself having dogfights in space, gun battles on a planet surface, defending your ship from boarding parties, and capturing ships belonging to your enemies.
• Huge Seamlesss Procedurally Generated World
  Explore procedurally-generated planets with millions of square kilometers of surface area. Seamlessly travel from a planet’s surface to the depths of space, with no loading screens, warp doors, or invisible walls. Investigate asteroids, moons, space stations, and stars.
• Open-Ended, Simulated Gameplay
  Rodina will boast a game world simulation which supports player creativity and rewarding feedback. Release toxic gas into the engine room. Fly a false flag in order to trick your opponents into thinking you are their ally. Hack into the ship’s computer and delete the source code that fires the weapons, rendering them useless. In Rodina, experimentation and creativity are valued over following a game script written by a desginer.

The Grand Vision
There has yet to be a video game which delivers the experience promised by decades of science fiction like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Firefly. The ability to explore space, to interact on the macro scale of planets and stars as well as the micro scale of rooms and characters, to own and customize a ship which becomes a kind of traveling home, to be given the freedom to explore and interact with the world at one’s own will- these features have yet to come together in a single game which fulfills the dreamed-of worlds that scifi fans imagine. Rodina aims to be a small step in the direction of realizing those dreams.

 

[wetflame]

I would have liked to play this if it wasn't based around writing computer code. The setting was very appealing to me, the hours spent learning how to program a computer to turn my engines on or whatever was absolutely not something I would be interested in doing. So I guess I wasn't the target audience for this.

 

[Recall]

Now he fears failure, the mark of a broken man. You gotta just make what is fun, Notch.

Some people have created far too high expectations on his next project, which it can never fulfill. I think he is under quite a bit of personal pressure to put out another hit.

 

[Parakeetman]

I fucking knew it.

Dammit, Notch. How can you take a perfectly good concept and toss it like that?

If development is bleeding money / resources, then its better to focus that elsewhere. Hell if they just went back to doing minecraft full time adding in all of the things fans want / have made mods for they would literally be able just to continue making money off of that alone.

 

[OgTheClever]

I would have liked to play this if it wasn't based around writing computer code. The setting was very appealing to me, the hours spent learning how to program a computer to turn my engines on or whatever was absolutely not something I would be interested in doing. So I guess I wasn't the target audience for this.

The idea was that coding would be entirely optional and you could buy virtual programs from other people or use shareware in-game with code that others have made. It's a pity that Notch couldn't follow through and maybe get more people working on the project because I was really looking forward to this.

 

[TheForceWithin]

One-hit wonder.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Minecraft has earned its place in gaming history.

 

[Joseph Merrick]

Hopefully more developers are inspired by this stylized low poly low res texture look. It looks great.

I think the system shock 1 team was inspired by it. you should check it out!

 

[BanGy.nz]

One-hit wonder.

SHAMBLES

 

[thelatestmodel]

That's such a shame, I was really looking forward to it.

At least we still have Star Citizen on the way.

 

[gofreak]

Notch has commented on Twitter about it.

Sounds like we may hear more about his future creative direction soon.

 

[FStop7]

Well that sucks. I was looking forward to this and Quadrilateral Cowboy for their similar takes on using real programming as a game mechanic.

 

[PandaPedinte]

That sucks. I was hyped for this game.

 

[Jhriad]

Isn't that the game where you had to code things to your ships processor to get it to do anything? Sounded interesting but it was a terrible idea for gameplay if you ever wanted to actually sell copies.

 

[pants]

fuck

 

[HoosTrax]

One-hit wonder.

Exactly my thoughts.

I was skeptical to begin with, as I'm not sure it's ever been proven that he had the creative talent to match up with some of the other prominent indie developers out there.