Amazing!

The atmosphere is great, the mechanics are interesting, and it's really depressing. I didn't manage to beat the game because the constant random running around looking for the final crew member and the final ship part started tearing away at my psyche, both in the game and in real life.

If there was a minimap that showed all explored areas in the inventory screen, I probably would've tried to get all endings.

There are some minor technical issues, such as the double jump being too picky about when to trigger, and the jittery camera caused by rounding errors. I must say I found the jittering to somewhat help improve the atmosphere, but it still felt buggy.

I am very impressed! You just cost me almost an hour of development time.

When I first heard of this, I thought it might be something slightly legitimate, and was concerned for the community. But it turns out it was just a guy incapable of dealing with criticism, who also happened to have a severely lacking self perception skill.

The ability to deal with criticism in an adult way, and to be able to see that calling people childish is quite ironic, are extremely useful skills. I worry for his stress levels if he can't learn them. Life is much easier if you stop taking things personally.

That said, him turning this into a conspiracy theory rant is just comedy gold. :D

Very cozy! :D

It feels a bit like it wants to be like scribblenauts, except almost nothing works. The typing is a bit annoying when there's just a couple of different things you can do.

A small suggestion:
When typing "fireplace", the letters could light up one at a time to show what you've typed.
When typing other words, show the letters the player have typed and perhaps autocomplete/tooltips to show possible hits.
Sure, you'd find all options by just typing all the letters in the alphabet, but it's still exploratory to some degree.

To me, its about promoting the indie game scene, not about supporting individual less successful developers.

[Edit:] wow, that looked arrogant.. i didn't mean it in an arrogant way, but my English is failing me.

The problem is that the server has no container logic at the moment (it was purely written in the GUI, and I haven't taken the time to fully port it over yet), so it trusts the client. If two clients do things at the same time, you get a synch problem and a duped item.

It's annoying, and I will fix it. But it's a bug, not a cheat, so it's hard for server admins to prevent. :/

Minecraft is an indie game. If I'm not allowed to enter it just because it's successful, you're sending really weird signals.

I do see the point that other games might need to win more than Minecraft does, but how legitimate is the competition if you weed out potentially the strongest contenders just because they're successful?

Trust me when I say I will make a big thing out of the IGF thing if we make it there, blogging about the progress and other finalists. I already do talk a lot about other indie games I like, both on the blog, on twitter, in interviews and private, and I won't stop doing that.

If there any way I can do more for indie game development, just let me know.

Haha, we all love you. I definitely tell all of my friends that it is for sure a two man job.

Do you get paid well?

Not even remotely. I keep telling him to charge more. :/

I'm not sure.. The guy who will be leading it (I will be primarily on Minecraft) is starting mid November or so, then there's a bunch of initial development. It's very different from Minecraft. More "mainstream".
And nerdier.

Random question: does anyone here actually play the game through the web applet?

During the "free weekend" (server crash) where only the download was available, I got a surprising amount of email from people who much prefer the applet version! I don't know if it was people on here, but at least some people prefer it.

Some even claimed to get better framerate. They're probably telling the truth, but it's very strange. :D

Is this thread derailing?


.. it's derailing, isn't it?

I could possibly add the ability to bind the different slots to different keys (defaulting to 1 through 9).. When I play, I tend to put the stuff I need often in the 1-4 slots, then just mousewheel around to get to the last five slots.

Congrats on the big success Notch!

Any plans to write up how you promoted minecraft and got to this spot?

Thank you!

And I didn't! I posted a thread about it on this forum and on javagaming.org, and that's about it..

anyway, send me a free account if you like (my username/email on minecraft is [email protected]), although if possible please also consider using some of the popularity of minecraft to get more people involved in indie games in general (e.g. by mentioning tigsource.com for instance, or mentioning other indie games that the players of minecraft might enjoy), that'd be the important thing. it'd be great if minecraft wasn't just a fluke, but became the beginning of a long stream of indie games which outsell mainstream games.

I regularly tweet and blog about indie games I enjoy, and encourage people to participate in events like Ludum Dare. I've also (tried to, in some cases) donate relatively large sums to indie game developers who make games I enjoy, and who depend on donations. Also, one of the splash screen texts is "woo, tigsource!".

But yes, I can do more, and as a result, I've updated the community.jsp page.

(also, technically valve is indie, and regularly outsells other mainstream games. )

i'm a bit jealous too since i make about $200 a month on immortal defense sales and was the one who suggested the name "minecraft" to him when he was asking for names of it, and didn't even get a free copy of the game out of it

I suck at remembering names, so I geniunely don't remember that, but thank you! If you really want a free user account, of course I will get you one. :D

No, not even close.

But this is really interesting once you understand all the elements. Nice going as usual, jw!

I have not much to add that hasn't already been said, so I'll just say that this is really good!

Nice job!

Yeah, you're probably right. I'm almost certainly going to hire a business person soon, and I'll ask him/her to help me sort that bit out.


And I don't even remember editing that part out! :-O

It occurs to me that there's no trademark notice or privacy policy on your website. Do the lawyers not suggest that kind of stuff in your country? Given all of the user contributed stuff and the amount of users you have it seems like a time bomb not to have one.

Minecraft is not a registered trademark, so there's not trademark notice. There is an explicit mention of copyright, though.
I should put up a privacy policy! Not out of fear of getting into legal trouble, but to inform people what I do with their information. (I don't share it, and passwords are stored as well salted hashes)

I wish that permadeath would be implemented.

The only thing holding me back is that I want singleplayer and multiplayer to be almost exactly the same game (in fact, it WILL be the same later on, as playing SP will run a local MP server), and I can't figure out what to do when you "permadie" on a permadeath server.

Any suggestions? Getting banned for the remainder of that level on that server?

If you mine straight down and pay attention to the crack animation, you can use that as a compass. It's always aligned the same way.

But I am adding a proper compass item, inspired by the one in Dungeon Keeper where the actual icon would change to show what direction you're facing. And I will probably add some kind of watch or similar.