That's too bad. But if you're ever in Raleigh give us a ring. The last two meetups have had a good number of people.

Some people don't have a mousewheel. Maybe it would help if pressing a button multiple times scrolled through the items above it in your inventory. That way people could stack things they want in 1-4. Look at the way games such as half-life do things.

Also he has a blog, a twitter, is involved with all of his community, and updates (or tries to) every friday. Those are all different forms of marketing. Ultimately though it's having a product that people want to tell their friends about and share that got him where he is. It's not hard to go through those threads without seeing screenshots of people's stuff.

But he doesn't reply to my emails! (Not that I blame him)

I was rather surprised to find myself listening to Gorillaz.

Well if you want to see it that way, doesn't that just make vim into an IDE? 

If you surround the spawner with torches then it ceases to emit mobs.

Reminder, the Triangle-area indie games meetup is this Thursday, 7pm, Rally Point sports grill on north Harrison. That's just off 40 in Cary. Here's the meetup page for more info:

http://www.meetup.com/Triangle-Indie-Game-Developers/

Whatever man, you wouldn't be having your current problem if you were using an IDE It saves you time from not having to manage your build files. I've been there and it's not fun to deal with all that crap. Plus you get things like intellisense and file searching and the project tree and integrated debugger and lots of other tools that make your job easier. I hear ya about using specialized tools and I think an IDE is one such specialized tool you should be using. But you're right I just started an off-topic rant!

If it's taking longer than you'd like that's a pretty good warning sign that you should simplify it a bit

At the very least if you find you're too laden with valuables you can take some spare wood (you always carry spare planks with you right?!?) and craft a little chest deep in a dungeon, put all your shit in it, and retrieve it once you can be assured of a safe passage back to your house.

Advice: Instead of searching for cave entrances, make a mining shaft that goes directly into the ground. Every time you hit a cave make a little room and a door so that you have a good place to retreat once you get your loot. Also just like saving your work in any other program, don't carry around more than you're willing to lose.

I hope that Notch makes it so that you don't lose all your stuff once you die. The ticking timer thing is kinda lame. It would be very nice if there was a small chest with your belongings in it that you can go and retrieve at your leisure. Like, after you craft another sword and grab some armor to deal with the baddies that killed you.

Another new blog entry on the design process for one of the game's units.

Well that guy came and proved me wrong about the score thing, oh well!

And if you don't use any IDE's then you get what's coming to you. Express is free after all.

I believe that most features in alpha were the result of the "Secret friday updates" in which the game was for the die hard rabid fans to guess what notch had added by trying out crafting things until something worked. That's why there's no in-game tutorial, because it was a kind of marketing gimmick used by notch. I don't think he ever intended it to blow up so much before there was even any usability work put into the game. In the meantime you'll just have to google all of the recipes.

Don't know about SMP. Wouldn't be surprised if it's broken. I've had stairs orient the wrong way towards each other in SP, and I fixed it by placing a block on the side where the wall should be.

You guys are feeding the troll.

Stairs are easy once you get the hang of them. Always have a wall to their sides, that's mainly what they use to determine which way is up. You can place the wall after you place the stair and the stair will re-orient itself.

Go in your visual studio linker properties and find the extra linker options or whatever and try sticking this in there (that's what she said lawl)

/SUBSYSTEM:WINDOWS /ENTRY:mainCRTStartup

I'd give you the exact page name but my visual studio es en espanol.

The red ones: The screenshot on the first post is enough to describe why the red one are different. They fallow a different type of orbit. Is this not apparent when you play?

No... maybe I'm blind. In fact looking at the screenshot I still don't see it. Looks the same to me

So you want to go the Nethack way eh? If you like instadeath and hate powerups then I'd highly suggest you reduce the difficulty rampup. A new player should be able to play for a minute or two without dying, but as a new player I never lasted more than a couple seconds. I'm sure I could get better with practice, but... I mean, something needs to be done. If the first thing that happens when people open your game is they die a lot, it had better be a fucking awesome game or you won't keep them for long. You need more variety than just different enemy types. You have a great idea and I think you should iterate on it.

What I mean by goal and progression isn't really "get a better score." That's something that gamers haven't really been motivated about since arcades died. I don't think it's helping your game any. Level structure would help a lot.

Play area: This new size is better. I might even go a little bit more.

I think this game idea is promising. I wouldn't mind seeing what more you can do with it.

But you have to read and respond to everything we post? What exactly is your goal here? Are you trying to convince everybody else not to like Minecraft? Or do you just have a deep seated desire to tell everybody how much Minecraft sucks? I dunno, it's easier to believe that you're trolling.

• no in-game instructions or tutorials.  Don't want to hunt wikis.
• feels claustrophobic.  No peripheral vision.  Monsters attack from nowhere and kill me.
• 3d performance is poor
• graphics are ugly
• why jump all the time?  too much to ask to just walk up hills, to swim on the surface of the water?
• no free demo.  I got lucky to try it for free.  There is so much missing, that I don't think people should be paying money until they've seen what they're getting into.  They could really love it or really hate it.

What? I can't hear you over how much fun I'm having playing Minecraft.

Seriously those are valid points but at this point you're just trolling. You don't like the game, fine. Go not like it in your cave where you don't start shitfights with the people who do.



Gentlemen, welcome to Skull Head Mountain. On the top right you can see my fortress peeking up from the top of the mountain. Out back I have a mine shaft that goes straight down to adminium. For some reason mobs almost never come to my front door.

Did you have any complaint other than the terrain generation? If the game were flat it'd still be a lot of fun, what with the digging and building.

Boring usability shit:

* Might want to make that download link more apparent, it's squeezed between two screenshots and I almost missed it.
* If ya wanna be like a pro, don't have a readme, have tooltips to show the player how to play while he's playing the game. Nobody reads readme files anymore.
* The MS Dos box comes up in the background. There's like 5 ways to kill that.
* It crashes (or closes?) when I press 2.
* "Move the avatar up here to start" instead of just "up here to start"
* I get that the gray ones stop once they're hit but I still don't know what the red ones do that's different. They need some better indicators or something that shows how they're different than the blue ones, other than that they're red and they twist.

Okay this game is pretty fun, for the first 30 seconds or so. After that I feel it needs more variety. Also I feel it needs a larger playing space, I always feel like I'm running out of space. Here are some suggestions for making the gameplay more interesting.

* Instadeath is lame. Give me hit points and ways to heal them!
* Powerups. I want to be able to pick up powerups that do cool stuff. Powerup ideas:
 - Shield - projectiles bounce off you for a short time.
 - Black hole - Perma higher gravity for a short time.
* The closer you get to an enemy, the more risk you take. Therefore, the more reward it should give you. Perhaps if you get close and fling them into the side wall hard enough, they explode. Perhaps it spawns a powerup.
* There's nothing to do when there's only one enemy.
* Avatar movement I think could be improved to make it less direct. Not unresponsive, but more like you're applying force to a body in space. Right now it moves in such... straight lines...
* Those explosions are cool but every time one happens, it pulls my eye to the wrong part of the screen and I get blasted by the next enemy coming my way.
* And lastly, you need some kind of goal or progression. It's got interesting gameplay but "avoid dying" only works for so long. After a while the player gets something new and exciting that inspires him to keep playing for a while.

Also it needs a better name. I like gravity games so I'll play anything with gravity in the title but gravity battle is kinda dull.