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Minecraft Is Finished
SharkLaser writes "Minecraft, the most widely known and best selling indie game in the history, is now finished. Minecraft creator Notch tweeted yesterday that Minecraft has gone gold and will be released at the end of the week at the first Minecon, a gathering of Minecraft fans. So far over 4 million people have bought the game, generating over 50 million dollars in revenue. Minecraft has also had a rapid modding community around the game, developing gems like the Millenaire mod, Builders and Tornadoes. Minecraft also brought back the interest in voxel based engines, introducing games like Ace of Spades (build, make tunnels, capture the flag FPS) and Voxatron [note: you might want to turn down your volume for this video]. It also opened up many ways for new indie developers, as Minecraft showed development can be funded solely by making something new and giving out early access to the game for those who are interested in the project. The upcoming Steam-like IndieCity-platform will also employ similar feature where, in addition to normal indie game store, players can look at unfinished projects and choose to support their development."
They've explicitly and repeatedly stated that while the 1.0 release is a major milestone, it's essentially arbitrary, and their development work on the game won't change quantitatively or qualitatively once it passes.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
That's what I want, because I just found an awesome seed, -6035877519343706770 and I'd like to try it with an "official" version of the game.
Try it yourself, mountain islands, two nearby villages, some deep chasms, and a readily accessible diamond chunk in a tunnel not too far away.
Notch is a man bursting with ideas, but from what I've seen, he is an atrocious project manager. The number of half-baked ideas and functions still left in the game even at 1.0 (Although as a previous commenter mentioned, this is a very arbitrary number for the game) speaks volumes about the company's attention span when implementing new features. They always seem to get halfway there, and then abandon it for the next lightbulb that lit up.
Of course, the title is praised by both computer game enthusiasts and casual passers-by across the world, and the simple but powerful idea of creativity, survival, and effort/reward are fully realized. But when bedroom coders do impressive mods in their spare time over a weekend, and the devs take months refining trivial bugs, it says to me that there is a world of possibilities missed out due to a very amateur approach to development.
Just my two cents.
Replayability.
Even something as silly as Nethack has almost infinite replayability, and that's why it's popular. (It doesn't mean that making games replayable will instantly make them hits, but it's certainly a large factor).
I've realised, though, that no matter what games I emulate from my "golden" period of gaming, that I quickly get bored of them and move onto other games, except for a certain handful that you *can* just keep playing over and over again even if you've played them for 20 years on-and-off.
Modern games rely on things like multiplayer options to provide their replayability but that relies on people *wanting* to play it online to the extent that they setup / buy / manage servers / games for it. Multiplayer really was the death of creativity in videogames.
The problem is that games authors don't match replayability with making money. If someone can only reasonably play a game once or twice before they get bored / stop having fun, then they'll go and buy another - maybe a sequel - instead. It's not directly profitable to make a game replayable. It's a rare instance where a replayable game can just make that amount of money overnight because of people "rewarding" them, effectively, for making such an enjoyable bit of gameplay - few others will enjoy that success even if their game is better AND more replayable.
I judge my Steam purchases by hours of gameplay per pound (about $1.50). Anything over 10 hours per pound is usually pretty good. Some games are in the hundreds of hours per pound. Most half-decent games manage at least 1 hour per pound. Anything below that I consider a loss. So the game has to be either amazing and long (rare - HL2 managed it), or it has to be cheap, or it has to be very replayable.
How many games, when you replay, do you end up doing the same things, talking to the same characters, hitting the same buttons, being "ambushed" at the same points, etc.? (I tired of Magicka very quickly because of that (and because of their stupid save system).
How many have a formula - "press this button, then hide on that platform and shoot until everything's dead" - that, once you work it out, you can follow and be pretty certain of constantly making progress? Even HL2 is guilty of both problems and thus why I've never really replayed it.
But silly things like Minecraft, Nethack (and spin-offs like Dungeons of Dredmor), Elite and a thousand other games are replayable enough that even if you *DID* make it through and complete the game, you could go back for more and it would be different. For HL2 you'd still be subject to the same cutscenes, the same forced route, the same decisions, etc.
It's not just an "open-plan" game like the Grand Theft Autos - you still have to do the same mash of missions in the same time in the same way doing the same things in those even if you have choice of which one to do when - but a replayable game. Replayable games can even be quite repetitive at times, but they don't stop being fun to play because it "feels" different - like you've acclimatised to how the world works but it's still a new world each time with its own challenges.
Big-name games don't have the same replayability that they used to - it's definitely followed the indie genre more than the commercial publishers. Sequel after sequel after sequel don't make something more replayable - it's like the difference between being given three "one night" game rentals, and being given three games. With modern games, you'd hardly notice the difference because you'll never load them again, but with the best games, you'd much rather pay more and own them forever and get to play them as much as you'd like.
As someone who's racked up over 500 hours on Altitude, 100 hours on Dungeons of Dredmor, 1000's of hours on Counterstrike, it's disappointing that most of what make them great is missing from commercial games that people queue outside stores for, see advertised on TV, etc.
Replayability is the key. If I don't get an hour per pou
The part that I like best about the Minecraft story is that the shambling masses of "me too" handout junkies have no answer to it.
"My concept is the next Minecraft, so give me money" doesn't and can't work as a pitch. If your project is the next Minecraft, funders will be chasing you because you already have a game and players, and you'll be laughing at them because you're already making money, directly, without their intervention.
Die, parasitic middle-men, die.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Notch: Look what we have built team! Look at this beautiful creation we have made! Hours of sweat and labor finally complet*SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSBOOOM*
Notch: DAMMIT!
I'd go back slightly further. Since the introduction of Parappa in 1997, there really haven't been any genre-making games that I remember. Even Katamari Damacy is just the old arcade game Bubbles redone as a 3D platformer.
And by that standard there has NEVER been a movie with an original plot and all of the works of fiction of our lifetimes are just hackish copies of the same stories that existed thousands of years ago.
We're a culture that loves the new and sometimes the innovative. When it really comes down to it, there's not that much that's truly new (at least by your standards for video games!). I don't really like the argument, and it's kind of reductio ad absurdum, but posting on slashdot is basically just a form of email, email is basically the same as a telegraph, a telegraph is basically the same as writing a letter, and writing a letter is basically the same as memorizing a message and telling it to someone else. So were any of these things truly innovative? People have been relaying messages for tens of thousands of years!
Beyond that, I would say video games don't really HAVE to be innovative. Again, by your standards, World of Warcraft was not at all innovative. Very little in Warcraft was new, innovative, or unique (see EQ, UO, MUDS, etc). But it was all done really damn well! Sometimes excellent execution of a well-liked idea/game/plan is good enough!
Gameplay implies rules, and goals, and mechanisms.
You can have fun for hours in a paint program, but that does not make it a game.
The open-source minecraft clone, minetest, is surprisingly complete, playable, and fun.
http://c55.me/minetest/download.php