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Notch Shelves Space Game 0x10c, Cites Pressure, Desire To Work On Small Projects
Sockatume writes "Marcus 'Notch' Persson of Minecraft fame has indefinitely postponed his planned space game, 0x10c. Taking time to chat during a streamed TF2 game, Notch explained that he didn't have the energy to keep up with the community's interest; fans had gone so far as to transcribe the source code from his development livestream. The game's development had been stalled since April this year, when Notch explained that it simply wasn't fun to play, but other staff at Mojang can resume the project if they wish. He intends to continue his pre-Minecraft habits and 'make small games and talk to other game developers about them'."
minecraft - hands off in alpha
0x10c, hands-off in planning phase
It would be nice to see you see something through.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's cool that he is handing it off to the community, but other than that -- there isn't much of a story here. Developers -- especially game developers -- prototype ideas and work on them for months all the time. Ultimately, they often result in nothing. Things don't work. Technology isn't there yet. The userbase shows no interest. Or, probably most often, the developer just loses their passion for that project/prototype and moves on to something else. Notch could go through twenty of these before he finally lands on something that he feels passionate about for the long-haul.
Be nice to see you accomplish a fraction of what he has ("big talker/armchair qb" that you are by comparison).
It's been labeled 1.0 and even released on disc for a closed platform. This makes it "finished" by at least some objective standards. Was Quake III Arena for Mac and Windows not finished while it was still getting patches? Are Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games "not finished" while they're still getting DLC? Was Doki Doki Panic for Famicom Disk System "not finished" because Nintendo revised it into Super Mario Bros. 2: Mario Madness for NES, Super Mario All-Stars for Super NES, and Super Mario Advance for Game Boy Advance, adding more than a straight port each time?
Taking time to chat during a streamed TF2 game...
:D
Well there's the problem right there.
It kills me how people complain about how in a hurry they are and how they never have the time to do anything, and they never connect it with the fact that they're always gaming.
Karma going down in 3...2...1...
Fortune: System going down in 5 minutes.
He heavily promotes a new project, even live streams his coding of it, then quits because people are paying too much attention to it. WTF. If you don't want anyone paying any attention to your projects, don't live stream the coding of it. Just don't talk about it, and release it when its done.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Except that when your own company develops video games, gaming is more like researching a competitor's product or service.
There are quite a few games already well on their way to completion that are generally similar to the publicized ideas for 0x10c:
... and then there's Star Citizen, of course; a cross between Freelancer and Wing Commander - but you'll need to wait a while.
Blockade Runner will feature "fully destructible, operational, crewable 'living' starships in a procedurally generated galaxy".
https://blockaderunnergame.com/home.aspx
Shores of Hazeron is a first-person 4X-style game featuring fully-customizable spacecraft, city building and management, exploration, trade, combat, and more. It's playable right now, though it's under heavy development.
http://hazeron.com/
http://robertsspaceindustries.com/
If there's one thing I learned from the film Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead, it's "delegate, delegate, delegate." If you know you're not the right kind of person to finish a project, then bring in someone else who is. Baseball likewise has a concept of a closing pitcher who specializes in finishing games.
The number is 0x10^c..... note the exponent.
Not that it matters much any more, but the number is a fair bit larger.
Something I see often about developers and most developers know for themselves.
The first 30% to 60% of a project - especially if you are not simply tying frameworks together but creating most things from scratch - are fun. People work overtime without even knowing it. As soon as the tiresome stuff starts, and the mostly painfull/dull last 5% to 10%, motivation drops.
Well, as someone who develops games, it's actually 9001% creating experimental things and prototyping new ideas. Coming up with the core mechanic(s), and proofing the in-game player interface, etc. That's the hard part. I'd say less than one out of ten ideas plan out. Coming up with tangential mechanics and adding a bit of depth that works is the first 30% to 60% of the actual project, and putting the polish on something and seeing through is the rest, but there was a ton of effort you never even see, possibly even entire games that never see the light of day. Even if you do make public the "in-progress" game/ideas most of the them won't be known to the general public leading up to a successful project.
So, what if someone came along and does most of the experimenting and prototyping and comes up with something playable and fun. What if instead of coming up with your own ideas you just take that? What if you add a bit of the tangential stuff to someone else's proven core mechanics and gameplay platform. If you do that you can avoid all that pre-production work. That's what Notch Did.
So, if you got rich by co-opting someone else's ideas wholesale, and your own new ideas are bland and self admittedly devoid of fun... What would you do? Would you decide to go back to making procedural rip-offs of mario? Maybe hang out with some indie gamedevs since that's where you got your best idea from in the first place? Isn't that what Notch would do if he needed new ideas to execute before lesser funded folks could?
Oh, maybe not. Maybe Notch just needs less pressure, yeah, that's it... Let's ignore the whole "Creative Block" story that came out months ago: "It's just some kind of weird creative block that's been going on for too long and [0x10c] is going to be put on ice until we can fix that."
Huh, a weird creative block, that's actually very odd. Odder still that this cancellation is news... You know, most game devs, especially indies, suffer from having so many damn ideas they have no time to try them all out. A common problem is having TOO MANY projects going on at once, and these are just a few folks with zero dollars... The games you get could have been 50 times better in most indie devs' minds, they just had to stop adding stuff at some point -- Or strip stuff out to streamline gameplay. How Strange.
FYI: If you hang out with Notch, keep your ideas to yourself, especially if it's kind of fun. Don't get Zynga'd. Don't be Notch's next Infiniminer.
Then it's a question of wether it's a private or semi-private project or something that HAS to be finished. Sadly, many (unexperienced) developers tend to give their timeframe projections during those first "proof-of-concept" days or weeks, and then become even more frustrated when they realize they can't hold the deadline and everything becomes even more painful. I think most of us have been there. And since 0x10c was a very "special" idea from the beginning, I am not as surprised as I though I would have been that the project is shelved. At least he admits that it simply wasn't fun...not an easy thing to do when you speak about your own pet-project.
I don't think people praise notch for being a great game designer, do they? He kinda just kept doing stuff and hit it at the right time with the right game. We hadn't been subjected to the alpha funding model before, and that sale of 'promise' was still new and squeaky, and indie games hadn't quite exploded yet, right time, right place.
All games are copies and iterations on existing ones, EQ -> DAOC -> WOW for example, each added their own twist to the previous and improved upon it. I played infiniminer before getting minecraft and it just lacked something that minecraft has, that flavor and personality of the world.
Anyway I agree strongly with your sentiment but the fact is that the world doesn't reward hard work and knowledge and creativity. I have a friend working on a game with this pretty bad ass hand built 2d engine, he made it back before Unity/UDK existed and all that in c++ / dirextx. It is really kickass honestly, and the game play of several of his games is pretty damn good, a one man creation of a functioning RTS.
Though the art was off, he lost money/time to add the polish layer once the engine and gameplay was good, and the game sold basically nothing. That polish push is where the $'s are at, and always has been. The world always walks on the back of great engineers, and unfortunately I don't see this trend ending any time soon.
The answer is: you shouldn't, but another question is: why anyone should care about what you think is of value? Especially people who managed to make something that is of enough use to millions of others for them to voluntarily give their moneys to him...
but the popularity suggests those are not game breakers and don't ruin the fun for most of those who play it.
I think the real question is "how are people actually playing the game" I'm seeing signs that the majority of non-hardcore players are simply using creative or playing on peaceful.
Sheer space of things you could do is the fun part, not the things you can't.
True, but how do you find out what you "can" do? You use the wiki.
Oh, and I like reading the wiki, just to find out what others found and thought up. Should Mojang include a five page tutorial on basic redstone logic and then a dozen pages more on advanced ways to apply it?
When you play Civilization, what does the game have built into it? The Civilopedia! Even Civilization Revolution has it! Tells you everything you need to know to play the game.
I doubt it was a lack of ideas on what to do with the game. The problem was that almost everything he did was essentially a re-creation of Minecraft, simply set in space. Trying to get away from Minecraft, voxels, and stuff like the Minecraft work bench just proved to be too hard to get away from, particular when his goal was for a similar kind of open-ended game that players could build stuff in.
Supposedly he worked on a spacecraft interior design tool (different from the block placement tool he worked on earlier), and the physics engine in the demo looked pretty good. Some parts were clearly superior to anything done in Minecraft.