Notch Wants To Make a Firefly-Inspired Sandbox Space Game

silentbrad sends this snippet from PCGamer: "After stepping back as lead designer of Minecraft earlier this year, Notch has been considering what to do next. ... While he's still deciding exactly what he wants to work on, he told us that he'd quite like to do a sandbox space trading game like Elite, 'except done right.' Notch is aiming for something with a bit more character than the classic trading sim. Instead of being the spaceship, you'd be a character inside the spaceship. 'I want the space game that's more like Firefly,' he said. 'I want to run around on my ship and have to put out a fire. Like, oh crap, the cooling system failed, I have to put out the fire here.' He hasn't decided to make the game yet, and doesn't mind if someone else takes up the reins. 'If someone steals the idea before me, that's totally fine. I just want to play that game,' he said."

Comments

Sounds similar to a game on Kickstarter just now.

[Anonymous Coward]

FTL
It is a spaceship roguelike where you actually control the ship up close, rather than directly.
Glad it got funded, these guys sound pretty good and the idea sounds solid.

Would like to see him have a try at it. So little actual decent space-trading games that are full-on, large or even fun.
So many of them are just a plain chore to get in to, and you can lose everything just like that.
Quite literally a second job to get in to in order to even play most of them.

Re:amazing

[Rowan_u]

Coding isn't just about writing amazingly optimized code, or running as close to the metal as you can get; or heck, it isn't even about not crashing. The whole reason for Java and the other high level languages is so that less analytical geniuses and more artists/thinkers can get into programing. Notch is a perfect example of a regular guy, who isn't really the greatest coder or artist, but never-the-less, still managed to outdo every single 100+ team dev house. Why? 1. the balls to buck absolutely every convention. 2. the presence of high level abstracted languages and libraries for him to build on. 3. the willingness to borrow from what comes before (Infiniminer, Dwarf Fortress, Gary's Mod) 4. pure damn luck. Notch is a phenomenon, not simply because minecraft is an amazing game, but because we love a rags-to-riches storyline :)