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

Notch

[Intrepid imaginaut]

Is Notch his real name or just his street name on... developer... street...

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.

It's called Sundog

[bfwebster]

Wayne Holder and I did it 27 years ago for the Apple II. ..bruce..

X Rebirth

[gbjbaanb]

It's called "X: Rebirth" and is a follow-on to the quite successful X series of games (the current version being X3:Albion Prelude). These are pretty much Elite type trading/fighting sandboxes, but with multiple ships, remote controlled fleets (ie you can buy traders and set them off on autopilot trading for you), fighting (of course, but with wingmen ships or just sent your fleet of frigates or carriers to defend your trading sectors from the bad aliens, robot aliens or pirates), plus missions to keep things interesting - both small "transport a passenger to x", and large "follow a whole set of missions in a series to do something major".

What's a bit special (and controversial in the X community) is that the new game will be based around a single spacecraft (previously you could decide what kind of ship to pilot) but that has different 'rooms' to play from - so your co-pilot can be set to fly while you remote-control your combat drones or play the stock market or whatever.

Read more on the developer's forums

Nobody's quite sure exactly what it'll be like, but I think we can be confident Egosoft will pull the rabbit out, X3 served me very well for over a year, and I still didn't manage to finish all the plot missions. You can buy X3 on steam or impulse (or whatever impulse is called nowadays) for next to nothing, it cost me $10 in a special offer that seems to be repeated regularly.

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 :)