I can only imagine the kind of pressure someone like notch is put in from their players and fans, but there's a little more to this story than "the little side project that ended up owning me".
0x10c was a thing. It was announced, had a domain and website with documentation and updates [1], had preview videos, etc. The point is that it looked and was sold like a product, so it's perhaps understandable that lots of people were waiting excitedly for it.
That said, there'd be nothing worse than notch feeling like he had to finish the game no matter what. That would be a sure-fire recipe for a bad experience all around. I think it's great that he's given his blessing to the independent effort, because 0x10c is just the kind of project that benefits the most from a team of people who hardcore geek out on it.
Nice bit of introspection. When I first started working I found I could make as much money as I could ever want by consulting and working. If you don't sleep much and you live in a consulting friendly place, its quite viable. But I too noticed that it made "home" also the "office" and you couldn't really get away from it, and that made it less fun.
So I ended up limiting my consulting considerably, and instead working on "fun" code (mostly robotics based) which as it turned out sometimes people wanted to pay for, but for the most part has been just for fun.
Notch has a wonderful gift, and while I mourn the fact that 0x10c is unlikely to ever see the light of day, I think having him make cool stuff is better than having him burn out trying to live up to the expectation momentum that 0x10c had developed.
OT but do you have any advice or have you written about your experience managing that kind of consulting? I've been trying to figure out a style of freelancing that works for my personality (fewer hours, more "asynchronous"), but it seems like most companies are looking for folks to fill an employee role.
> Some people in the 0x10c community decided to work together to make their own version of their game, called Project Trillek. I find this absolutely amazing. I want to play this game so much, but I am not the right person to make it. Not any more. I’m convinced a new team with less public interest can make a vastly superior game than what I would make.
I've only read a few of the feature length articles on Notch (such as this one in the NEw Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/the-m...) but he sounds like a real stand-up guy. I love the statement above, because it's a graceful concession as well as a statement that (hopefully) encourages creativity and innovation, even if it's among other people. What a morale booster it must be to have Notch believe that you (the team behind Trillek) can make a better game than he can.
Also, I think it's cool to be reminded that notch is also a gamer, after all, and that even he enjoys being a wide-eyed-consumer, something which he can't be when he's creating the game.
It's refreshing that someone like him basically speaks out on an issue many if not most of us face. If we had the freedom to work on anything we wanted, I couldn't make my mind up. I'd start working on this side project, probably shortly after switch to that other little idea, then maybe try out this gadget and hook it up to that service and that would keep me going endlessly. I love trying new stuff, figuring things out, hacking them. But turning these things into products is a whole different game.
I deeply feel that very moment he describes, when a fun side project becomes a real duty and you have to work on it because people demand it. If you're without funds or income, it might be your only option, so even if it's not fun, it doesn't matter as long as it might generate income eventually. But once you're past that requirement, these things often stay little side projects that rarely end up being finished.
But these little side projects are basically how I taught myself most of what I know in programming.
I've had tons of projects that I've started working on, really prototyping, only to move on to something else once I figured out it wasn't something I want to invest time in, so I know where Notch is coming from. I couldn't imagine developing prototypes in a way that had tons of users watching me.
Notch knowing himself - knowing that he isn't the right person for the game, is great. I hope the community does pick up the game. This was a game that I was looking forward to playing (as I am sure most others were).
However, what he enjoys doing is developing games, not directing them or any sort of management. In that respect, he wouldn't do very good in a purely decision making role, and would probably burn out.
Minecraft can be extremely addictive. I know from personal experience. To give you an idea, I'm a freelancer and for a large percentage of last year I was playing more hours of MC a week than I was billing clients.
You sound like you may be similar to me with games so let me lay it out for you.
When you first start playing you know nothing. There's so much to do and learn. You'll be scared of nighttime and dark caves. You won't know how to craft anything. You'll probably get killed a lot and get lost. It will suck you in for the first 30-60 hours while you learn how to play single player.
At that point one of two things happen. Either you really like building structures and you keep playing a lot or you get bored. I got bored.
Then I realized I was only experiencing a small fraction of the game. The modding community is HUGE, larger than any other game I've played. There are hundreds of mods available that expand and modify gameplay making it far more interesting than "vanilla" MC. Each mod can add 5-50+ hours of interesting gameplay.
This isn't even accounting for multiplayer, which can be much different. PvP servers with clans, mod servers with large towns, creative servers with builds that take months to complete.
I'm not saying you shouldn't play. Minecraft is a great game. Just be aware of where it can lead if you don't plan your time well. I've since cut way back and don't play games as much.
One way you can get a good feel for MC is to watch some of the popular YouTubers. I primarily watch the Yogscast but there are plenty of other good ones.
This makes the pocket and xbox edition experience quite a bit different from the PC/servers version.
My experience was I made a lair basically tunneling out an entire 100x50 ish island, built a tower going up until I was bored and a spiral staircase from top down to bedrock, then dug what amounts to a giant multi-lobed endless loop subway just above sea level around the map (probably about 4 minutes, yes that is indeed a lot of mined/smelted iron, and gold/redstone to boost my cart up to speed) diverted into optimized partially-automated chicken production, then got kinda bored. I think I got about a hundred hours of fun out of it, which, for what it costs, is an excellent rate of return.
It reminds me of an old saying about "second life" from about a decade ago, where if you can't be entranced by it for at least a dozen hours, there's probably something wrong with you, but much after a hundred hours or so, its kind of boring.
A third comparison of about equal depth and entertainment was playing Eve:Online also about a decade or so ago without joining any social groups (which was impossible because I was scavenging random hours here and there, and clans wanted dedicated scheduled mining/raiding nights and such)
All three share the characteristic that its hard to go beyond a hundred or so hours without the community, although if the community drags you in, then you're stuck in there forever.
There's probably a startup lesson in here that if you want more than 100 hours of engagement, its going to come from the community, not the programmers / artists / suits.
I've gotten to the point where I'm not sucked in and addicted to MC anymore, but since it was the building part that I got stuck on, never modding or multi-player, I still get plenty of enjoyment when I periodically think of something new to build.
(E.g. I built a residence, garden, etc. in a cloud then decided I could expand that to a several-cloud city. Then decided I could build a tower with railroad in an attempt to bring cows and pigs up there. The next project might be an underwater city, or play around with the new horse stuff they added.)
New content is added occasionally. I'm not entirely sure why, since they don't have continuous subscription revenue like WOW does. I actually find it kind of annoying since then I need to explore another huge swath of territory to get new chunks to generate with the new stuff in it. Or worse, if the new stuff breaks the timing on some of my red stone circuitry or the effectiveness of my experience generator.
Similar to the game he canned, check out Red Power 2 for MC, it's actually got an in-game computer you can program it in Forth, save programs on in-game floppies, and build a giant IO bus to control various things in the game world.
If you like games like SimCity, you might like Minecraft. Although SimCity has much deeper game mechanics, Minecraft focuses on exploration. (HN crowd: bear with me, they're b both exploratory world-building games to a certain extent with terraforming. For me personally, my enjoyment of them is the same for similar reasons.)
There are a large variety of clones out there, and "inspired" titles, but Minecraft got a lot right as far as a sense of exploration is concerned.
There's a fairly advanced open source "Minecraft-inspired" game called terasology I found this weekend:
It's not as polished as Minecraft, but if you just want to get a feel for the basic mechanics and tinker without having to pay anything, it's worth a look.
Notch doesn't maintain Minecraft himself these days; Jeb at Mojang does. But they're doing a great job.
I no longer have the time to play Minecraft regularly, but I revisit it from time to time, just like Simcity.
As a game with any purpose aside from building, it falls flat. After the first evening or two, monsters aren't a real issue unless you want them to be, exploration is somewhat dull after your first few caves, and the graphics (while arguably part of Minecraft's charm) are about as basic as you can get.
There are a number of mods and texture packs which address some of these issues to some extent or another, but even they get dull quickly.
Ultimately, it's a set of digital legos, and your enjoyment of the game will depend greatly on how much you want to play with digital legos.
Disturbingly addictive. I have those willpower problems, beware. I just downloaded it to try it and got captured. There's several modes of play, and lots of possibilities. So you keep coming back to it with what-ifs. I found something to take the magic out of the game: a no-clip tool that sees through the map shows all the caverns.
That depends on why you feel the need to keep playing a game.
Most games sort of pull you along. They want you to finish the whole thing, so there are various incentives to make you want to keep playing and progressing the game's storyline, or your character level or whatnot.
Games like Minecraft are more of an environment to push against. You keep playing because you want to finish your castle of doom or lake of lava or whatever.
Either type of game can suck you in, it just depends on your personality type. Personally, Minecraft doesn't do much for me; I'm much more vulnerable to the "just one more level" attraction of more linear games. I can't speak for you, though.
Classic mode is awesome. I haven't played in quite awhile, but there were some good servers with ridiculous amounts of awesome mods.
It runs much faster than normal Minecraft, and some of the features like cuboid, permissions, multiple maps running on the same server, etc, still haven't been added back to the main version of the game.
Because they aren't part of the game - they're server plugins, and are all available for Bukkit by now (and have been since at least Beta).
Cuboid is part of WorldEdit, there's tons of permissions plugin (PermissionsEX seems to be the most mentioned, though in both positive and negative terms) and there are quite a few MultiWorld plugins for Bukkit nowadays.
A generalized version of one sentiment really, really resonated with me ... "Turns out, what I love doing is personal passion. Not hyping personal passion or trying to sell a lot of copies. I just want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak." What working adult among us hasn't felt this at some point?
Eh. There are lots of reasons writers use pseudonyms. Separation of their day to day life from their writing life (one author I can't think of ATM did that because her academic coworkers would look down on the stuff she writes). Keeping writing that would appeal to different audiences easy to differentiate (Seanan McGuire does this, her zombie books are under the name Mira Grant). Searchability (whenever I am ready to publish something this will be my reason because my real name is far too common, winning the SEO war is almost impossible).
Obviously this is the reason Rowling did it with her recently uncovered book, but plenty of other reasons exist to use pseudonyms, both for existing and new writers.
Just watched a monumentally depressing (IMHO) documentary called "Indie Game" about indie game devs with various flavors of mental and physical illness, putting themselves through hell to get their game out. All of them seemed to find the buzz and pre-launch expectation/pressure, as well as the public response after (both good and bad) to be extremely distressing.
I find it interesting from the point of view that, to me, I assumed he would have at least somewhat internalized how closely he and his work is watched now. The fact that isn't the case is interesting.
I wonder if this will be the lesson that gets him to shift into that last bit of understanding as to what it means to be so watched by the wider world, awaiting your next bit of output.
This is like when Dave Chappelle walked on his show because he couldn't deal with being so successful. I honestly don't understand, but then again I've never been within 100 miles of that kind of problem.
0x10c was a thing. It was announced, had a domain and website with documentation and updates [1], had preview videos, etc. The point is that it looked and was sold like a product, so it's perhaps understandable that lots of people were waiting excitedly for it.
That said, there'd be nothing worse than notch feeling like he had to finish the game no matter what. That would be a sure-fire recipe for a bad experience all around. I think it's great that he's given his blessing to the independent effort, because 0x10c is just the kind of project that benefits the most from a team of people who hardcore geek out on it.
[1] http://0x10c.com/