Having picked it up a few weeks ago, the game is an odd blend of open-ended creative sandbox, epic-scale exploration and survival horror. It taps into that feeling of opening up a bin of Lego and not having a specific model instruction booklet. Its feature-set is still very fluid. Yet it seems to out-do Civilization's "one more turn". This is a game where if you picked it up tonight at 7PM and started out, you'd hear your alarm clock going off in another room as morning rolls in.
The game has essentially gone viral at this point. Multiple webcomics are covering it. There's decent coverage on social news sites. Industry rags have picked it up. Industry veterans (I have a friend at Disney Interactive, and another at BioWare) have absolutely taken notice, Valve in particular. Some review sites are seriously considering it as their "game of the year" candidate. This weekend the website (and authentication service) collapsed under load. With some outside help it's up and fine after some refactoring and offloading things to S3. Today he cracked 25,000 unit sales for the day, or about $340K USD in gross revenue.
Yes, he. Until very recently, it was basically a one-man show. There's a few dedicated folks coming on board now, but that's what's humbling. Today, Markus eclipsed my day's compensation in just 88 seconds.
What I think is interesting about the free-to-play period (due to website collapse) is that it may actually be a massive boost, because it gets the game client onto a lot of machines. That doesn't sound like much, but here's where it gets interesting: the client auto-updates itself, bringing in new content and features as they are built. To continue to get updates (AFAIK) you must log in with your paid credentials. You can continue to play the 'free weekend' version without doing so, but you won't get any updates. Thus people can continue to play and be addicted, and that 'Register' link is there waiting on the main menu when the urge for the new hotness overcomes them.
Also, kudos to Notch for supporting Mac and Linux. I guess we're getting to a point where, for indie games at least, a very compelling experience can be built using a less-than-optimal platform (in this case being Java, which heretofore hasn't been used for games a whole lot).
I run the (I think) main public server in Australia: the server ended up being a war ground, with impersonators causing havoc. Only now is the normal community of users reappearing, the normal fun state of affairs being restored: the "free" users wouldn't have had a fun experience :/
To be fair, I think this is also a reflection on the state of the multiplayer, which is obviously still in relatively early days in terms of both design and balance (compared to the SP game).
A lot of public SMP servers I've been on had anti-griefing mods that seem prone to breaking on updates. Combine that with removal of the paywall and (from what I hear) username validation, and there is a lot more potential for disaster.
> What I think is interesting about the free-to-play
> period (due to website collapse) is that it may
> actually be a massive boost,
I think the paypal withholding his funds may have also been a boost - I know I thought "An indie game that did $600,000 sales in one week? I need to check that out."
It may not have been intentional but I think some of the adversity that Minecraft has faced has been turned around nicely.
I think this advantage is further leveraged by the constant stream of updates he's putting out.. every week there are substantial updates to the game that have users finding better and better value for their money.
I loved it. I actually got to try the alpha, and see what it contained. Major sales point, though I haven't nabbed it yet (for fear of it consuming time I should be spending on my capstone essay).
Would love to see Mac performance improve, though. It suffers quite a bit. Methinks Notch is not a graphics wiz, though maybe a closet genius in emergent gameplay. I suppose I can hope, one day, for an OpenGL (ES?) implementation.
Minecraft uses a Java-wrapper for OpenGL. On all platforms. I say this primarily using OS X day to day. I've been running it on a Mid-2010 Mac Mini without issue. Most of the slowdown for the FAR render distance is I/O related.
The performance issues (and any graphics shortcomings) are due to the engine design, and probably a minimum of effort being expended on optimizing the game for performance, especially when the feature set is still amorphous.
Interesting, thanks. For me on normal + fast, fullscreening on a pre-unibody macbook pro intermittently stutters something awful. Though that was on a snow world, and I booted to Windows before experimenting further. Might I be missing something?
Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL, nor do I believe the other licenses have much merit other than to boost the egos of the original authors, so I might just possibly release it all as public domain.
Between Java Webstart, Desktop applications and Applets, It's always seemed to me like Java had a lot of deployment options. Consider the JWS setup used by TopCoder's IDE/Client[1] or Bytonic's Jake2[2]- both always impressed me as pretty seamless.
In your opinion, does it come down to the overhead of needing the runtime? Something else?
If you'd like to check daily (as i do) the progress of the minecraft sales and other statistics just go here: http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/ (official data taken from the minecraft site graphed with Google Chart API).
Minecraft has been a huge success, but $250,000-a-day is a little misleading. The site was down for the last few days due to mentions from Penny Arcade and elsewhere (PA ran two comics on Minecraft, which is insane exposure to a huge gaming audience). Notch turned the downtime into a free-to-play period, but you couldn't buy Minecraft while things were down. The $250k/day number actually represents a few days of sales pressure, but it's still awfully impressive...
To add: in order to continue playing Minecraft after the free-to-play period you have to buy a subscription, however I agree with the idea there have been recent spikes as people do buy it.
I read somewhere that Notch had accrued at least two million in PayPal but can't vouch that it's accurate.
Certainly not two million in PayPal all at once, but if you want to know how many copies he's sold the numbers are right here http://minecraft.net/stats.jsp and I don't think the price has been below €10.
I spent 12 years waiting for Starcraft II. I bought the collectors edition. I played to Diamond rank and beyond. But the day I started Minecraft was the last day I played Starcraft II.
It was scheduled maybe a month ahead of time, and located days ahead of time, and held in the middle of a field, in the rain; and still a about hundred people showed up. Just to see Markus.
Minecraft fans are dedicated, I'll give them that.
Half the game-- more than half the game is the crafting system. You make sticks out of planks, out of raw wood. You then make a hoe out of sticks and stone, plow some dirt, plant wheat seeds, water the wheat, harvest it when it's full grown, bake it into bread in a furnace out make out of stone and fueled with wood...
There's a lot more in this vein. Gabe has a well known weakness for stuff like this.
You have nothing but your own two hands. First order of business is to harvest some wood off the nearby tress, which you can make some tools out of. From there it's just a matter of building, crafting new stuff and staying alive.
This guy's video series goes over most of the basics, if you're interested:
The initial game with the day cycle and the monsters coming out at night is genius. Really taps into a primal light-and-shelter instinct. Also the light management with cave exploration is great.
However, once I figured out a wooden shack with a door built in a couple of minutes completely thwarts the AI enemies, I lost most interest. The setup is player against the world, but the world doesn't know how to do anything you'd need a huge stone castle or a massive trapped dungeon to fight against, so the great build system feels a bit pointless now.
Got to hand it to the author for making excellent core mechanics from a very simple set of ingredients. I hope he can keep up working on the style and figure out enemy mechanics you actually need serious constructions to fight against.
Yes, based on the author's plans, it looks like he's intending to add interesting in-game challenges:
Free building mode is fine and dandy, but for many people it will ultimately become boring once you've got it figured out. It's like playing a first person shooter in god mode, or giving yourself infinite funds in a strategy game.. a lack of challenge kills the fun.
For survival mode, I'd rather make the game too difficult than too easy. That also means I'm going to have to include some way of winning the game (or some other climax) to prevent it becoming too exhausting.
Yes a simple base is 100% safe, however if you spend 90% of your time exploring/mining caves (I do), you will find plenty of danger. That's really the point of the game--not building a base that's going to be attacked by mobs.
I get this. My problem was that I'm not feeling an incentive for even gathering the stuff, since survival is already guaranteed and there are no further in-game goals. I guess I need reasonably constant and threatening waves of attacking aliens to keep my "games are meaningless, I am wasting my life here" instincts from waking up.
You really need to set your own construction goals. I had the urge to build a big house in a nice location. The I wanted to protect it, so I built a low wall around it. Now I want to landscape the hill that it's on. Next I'll want to irrigate and start a farm....
Here's something that illustrates the sort of thing you can do in this game: a 12x5 LED display built in-game[1]. Reminded me of the Dwarf Fortress Computer[2].
"Perrson cites games such as Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper and Inifiniminer among key influences on Minecraft's anything-goes nature and blocky 8-bit style."
Blocky 8-bit style? Those graphics would have been cutting edge in 1993, almost a decade after the heyday of 8-bit systems.
Additionally, they are cutting edge now. The textures are so small for budget and performance reasons. When generating new terrain, my i7 920 system with a HD 4850 drops to 40 fps. You can download higher-resolution third-party textures, and they turn the game into a slideshow.
I like how you apparently came to that conclusion based on the language it was implemented in, and without any knowledge of its internal structure.
I just fired it up with the ATI Catalyst panel open, and it said a maximum of 53% GPU utilization. Which isn't bad, since Minecraft wouldn't be using any of the shader units.
Well, presumably, since I know as little as you do about how Minecraft is designed.
The rendering engine is pretty primitive by modern standards, and shows signs of being implemented by someone new to OpenGL. It displays all the performance issues that a typical first OpenGL implementation does like significant lag when turning around quickly where objects are swapped in and out of memory in a blocking manner.
It could benefit from significant optimizations in terms of algorithm and these would probably make it perform an order of magnitude even faster than porting the same code to C++ would ever do.
The OpenGL layer is not being utilized effectively. I think the game is currently CPU/VM bound and simply can't keep up with the GPU.
More aggressive use of the GPU, like through OpenGL or OpenCL calls, would improve performance considerably. I'm not sure how viable the OpenCL angle is on Java, though.
Hmm I'm not sure. Look at World of Warcraft, it looks OK-ish (by today's standards) but mostly because of the great texturing; poly count is way low. The reason is that the world is just do damn big, and I suspect it's the same with Minecraft. Even with advanced LOD algorithms, the open-ended world concept requires so many polygons to render that today's hardware is simply not sufficient to render it. Processoers and GPUs need to improve 10-fold in performance, and games like these will still easily use all that power. (by that time it may be more efficient to just raytrace them, especially as we'll have dozens of cores in a few years...)
Also, I suspect the Java and GPU points are moot, as I cannot image it doesn't use OpenGL. Now the Jave OpenGL implementation or intermediary or whatever may not be as fast as 'native' calls but I think it's not going to make a magnitude difference.
TL/DR: IMO it's not about the graphics quality but about the sheer amount of it.
"Even with advanced LOD algorithms, the open-ended world concept requires so many polygons to render that today's hardware is simply not sufficient to render it"
What? It's been awhile but ~ 5 yrs ago I remember implementing a quadtree LOD algorithm that pretty much allowed me to make the world as big as I wanted considering only the area nearby would be rendered. If its out of view, its a flat world.
"considering only the area nearby would be rendered"
Well yeah if you make the area around you small enough, then sure.
Taking WoW as an example again (because it's what I'm familiar with), decreasing the view distance is the single most influential parameter to improve performance. When you fly across a landscape and mountains pop up out of nowhere as you approach them, in triangles, it very much takes away from the realism.
Of course this is not just about rendering triangles any more, LOD is constrained by the CPU and memory, but more raw poly pushing power would lessen the burden on the CPU...
(experience drawn on a NVidia 9800 video card, not top of the line but a rather average casual gamer card I'd say)
Java can make full use of the GPU. The game uses LWJGL, a wrapper for OpenGL and other native/accelerated libraries. You can even use shader programs from Java.
My hat's off to this man. Perhaps the thing I envy most here is the fact that this guy's achieved this doing what he loves. According to his personal page, he's been building games for many, many years, and has entered dozens of small competitions. He seems to genuinely love building games, and would almost certainly continue doing it regardless of money.
The best I can sum it up: I can barely remember anything that has happened in real life since I started playing Minecraft on Saturday. All I have are Minecraft memories and I can't believe the clock now says it's Thursday.
Very dangerous if you want to stay productive. But I'm happy because I just made my first lava fountains outside my home (after spending an hour scouring the land trying to find where I had left my huge mine/home).
About the only hope I have is that Minecraft doesn't yet have a compelling co-op mode for anything other than massive building. The "survival" aspect seems not to work multiplayer yet, but if it did, my wife, kid, and I would be playing in there all the time. Because it doesn't work, I have to come up for air to spend time with them.
Completely there with you man. Initially I started playing and didn't understand why I couldn't use that weak shale you can dig easily with your hands for a pick and why the harder stone wasn't yielding anything. Once I figured out how to make all wood tools to get better resources, It was over man. I've now made like 5 different homes, and learned how to mark them from the spawn point. My memories of exploration and mining trump those of my daily duties in real life. My latest story was of mining a sub basement of my home, and discovering a vast underground cavern with zombies. I died, and lost that homes location. In the effort to find it, I discovered new land, with more features that replicated the movie Avatar. I have picked the tallest mountain in the clouds for my next project. A case of beer or mt. dew, and a free night, and I will conquer that mountain...
This game makes me want to start mining out of my basement in real life. However my landlord won't let me.
I'd also like to point out that this is the exact success story I needed to boost my ego for my day job and daily projects for startups and indie development.
Yeah-- I've been very paranoid about getting lost and had only died once before (but found it quickly somehow).
So I determined that I wasn't going to have that worry again. So I set off on a little quest after a lot of mining. I built a compass and was using it to dig tunnels and place markers all the way back to my spawn point.
About half-way there I got assailed by two spiders which I dispatched after they jump-kicked me down to 3 hearts. Of course, afterwards, a creeper had secretly locked onto me and dropped on my head, blowing me and my supplies and compass to smithereens.
So I respawned and my worst fears were realized... I was then hopelessly lost and couldn't find my way back to my town. I "found" some absolutely gorgeous rock formations and lavafalls in my travel.
Eventually I gave up, downloaded cartograph and drew a map of the level so I could get an idea of where my towers were. That worked out well and now I know the route back home. But I'm going tonight to finish the route markers.
tldr: I had a compass and a plan to mark my respawn route, but I got killed on the mission. I'll try again. :)
Basically the game is a really enjoyable way of spending hours and hours collecting resources and using them to create giant buildings and structures. It's a lot of fun but you're still sinking a huge amount of time on it. Sure, I had fun building that 30x30x30 (one unit is maybe 4 feet) castle but why did I spend 20 hours working on it over the weekend?
I built this huge thing which was fun (or at least not boring) but if I change perspective it just seems pointless. I don’t think there is anything wrong with some pointlessness – not better or worse than watching TV – but it seems like I wasted just a few too many hours on that pointlessness. It’s called Minecrack for a reason.
Don’t get me wrong, the game is awesome. I like the art and its general style very much, it feels like a piece of art.
I think a big part of the enjoyment comes from the feeling of ownership and achievement in everything you build. You have to work to get all that stone to build your house, and you have to build it yourself, brick by brick. You have to dig miles of tunnels to find those rare ores. Also, you actually have something to show for all the work you've done, something you can use. If you're playing survival, it's a fort that will protect you from your enemies. The third panel of this recent PA comic really sums that feeling: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/9/20/
Damn yes. The unsettling feeling you get when you enter a night and realize you haven't found any brimstone (or whatever is used to make torches) yet is awesome.
It's a bit too easy to escape the creepers though, because the physics are too forgiving. You can just build stairs in the sky and destroy the bottom steps to make an unreachable safehouse.
You might have to build another block or two to avoid triggering its special ability. I have yet to test this though, with how infrequently I run into creepers.
I'm not sure i should ask this considering i've been playing only for a few days and i'm starting to think i should stop... what do you mean with special abilities? there are special abilities?
I really hope the fellow behind Dwarf Fortress sees this success and starts charging a small amount for his releases.
I think the following DF has (despite its rough state) would provide impressive revenue and allow him to bring on employees to help build his game while earning him a comfortable living.
The thing is, minecraft is far, far more accessible than dwarf fortress will ever be without some major changes, and has a vastly greater potential audience.
It really does feel like Minecraft has made a new genre of game here, something that genuinely deserves the name "sandbox" because other than the bedrock way down below every single piece of the world can be dug up and manipulated.
It manages to tweak every single one of my addicting-game buttons, and even if no new features get added I'd happily rate it my Indie Game of the Year or possibly even Game of the Year.
Might be enough to get me back into SMP. I haven't played in a few updates, but I usually get intimidated by a long-running server that already has a lot of large scale construction projects finished (not to mention frustrated at trying to find a good build site for myself).
Can someone explain the appeal? I normally enjoy indie games with low-end graphics like Dwarf Fortress or Adom.
My first impression as I logged into a server was a giant landscape of multicolored blocks devoid of any meaning whatsoever. There was no survival horror element I could make out in 30 minutes of playing.
I decided to try building something only to be bored of drawing something block by block, like being a pixel artist that had to waste 10 seconds every time you wanted to zoom out. Then I tried following someone around who was also not doing anything interesting. I attempted to dig a bottomless pit under him until he presumably logged off, and at that point I also logged off due to boredom.
Unless it's changed in the last week, Multiplayer Survival mode is bugged (it's an alpha) so that monsters can't damage you. So most multiplayer servers are in Creative mode, where you just build stuff.
Single player survival still works, and is a lot of fun. The first day cycle is about getting a pick, a shelter, and some coal for torches before nightfall and zombies/skeletons come out. Then you spend the next few day/night cycles building up, and people usually start exploring around Day 5-10. And get horridly lost and have to construct shelter as the sun is setting to avoid monster attack.
And to get the good resources like iron and diamond and gold and redstone, you have to go spelunking in caves, where monsters can spawn in any dark spot. Even coal is only available in small amounts on cliff faces, so you have to either mine or spelunk for that too past the first few pieces.
Multiplayer is just a free for all, endless world sort of thing. In the single player portion of the game you build by day and are attacked by the undead at night.
Took a while for me, but things got interesting when I started crafting. From there and I had to go deep mining to find metal, and then I crafted my first diamond tool. Down there I had a few scary moments, only survived because of the metal armor I did. Until now I'm not very fond of building, I just build the necessary. Tried to start some fancy stuff, but lacked a lot of materials, so for now I'm just filling some chests and crafting tools and small stuff.
I think it is inaccurate when it says "sales grew to over 6,000 a day during this period." The sales when the Paypal account was locked HAD to have been ~$44k/day (or around 4,700 sales per day after taking fees imposed into consideration) as he said he had around $800,000 (USD) on September 10th (starting around the week of August 22nd).
I went through exactly all of what you just did. For the first half-hour, I seriously thought there was nothing to do but roam an indistinct world and collect flowers. Then I googled a tutorial, figured out you have to hold the mouse button down to break blocks, and started crafting. That's when the full magnitude of this game dawned on me, and my jaw went slack as I realized I might never get my life back again.
Three days later, I have a large, carefully surveyed, east-facing house on a hill by the sea, protected by a well-lit perimeter wall. I've developed endless networks of mines, caves, and tunnels. I have a storehouse full of supplies and building materials. And I've barely done anything else IRL.
The latter. It's totally possible I'm missing something, but I checked the site's wiki and can only seem to pick up flowers, beat cows to get meat, and pick up tiny little trees.
You can't get anywhere without it, and yes, it's very boring if you're not a total-sandbox-fan playing multiplayer. And the game does utterly squat to inform you that it exists. It took me an hour of poking around before I found that page, and then it all clicked.
So maybe I should warn you: it gets way more interesting when you start crafting. You start planning. Exploring. Fighting back against the zombies. Some caves are massive - light them up and find veins. Earning the ability to build your floating fortress is strangely rewarding.
It's also an oddly beautiful game in its simplicity - your lit caves are visible from a long way off with a soft glow, and you'll quickly find that light means safety... until the spider-riding skeletons start chasing you when you venture too far. And it's kind of creepy how quickly you start to feel ownership over what you've made.
The problem is, I don't see any zombies. All I see is terrain and flowers. And the occasional cow/sheep.
Do I just need to keep looking? What am I looking for? How do I get the different types of blocks? I found some by hitting the sheep (or whatever they are) but the same thing didn't seem to work on trees or terrain.
Gah. I do enjoy the freedom of the game. But I need to do something soon or I just lose interest and quit.
Playing... infdev? or alpha? I think only Alpha has enemies. Or whatever the free weekend played.
edit: With only exploration I didn't get any real interest. Personally, I'll probably get hooked when larger mobs come out, and when you start having to defend during the night from mobs which damage your fortress. Otherwise your investment is always secure, and there's no real threat that can't be solved by boxing yourself in and getting a sandwich.
And no mobs at night (edit: single player?)? Not sure, there might be a glitch, or you've got an old version. It's pretty easy to get killed the first night.
Another possibility is that you're too high up. They seem to cluster in the valleys, the "mountains" sometimes almost empty.
General starting point: punch some tree trunks to get wood, press "i" to open your inventory, and turn it into planks => wood. Build yourself a sword and some basic tools (arrangement of items matters), and start digging around in the stone areas / exploring to find caves. Digging totally randomly is unlikely to be too productive, so find caves to start. Find stone blocks with black specks, and use your pick to get coal - combine with sticks to get torches. Enemies spawn at night anywhere it's dark, so lighting caves is important to your safety.
Beyond there, it's mostly an exploration / building / sandbox game. It's not an appealing game model for everyone, though, so it may just be that it doesn't click for you (though give it a bit of time).
Another important one - four planks in a box together makes a crafting table, which you need to make stuff like swords and picks and axes.
Axes are sort of pointless, since you can knock down wood with any block equipped (even dirt). Your first day's goals are torches and shelter. Make a pick, explore until you find a cliff face with coal (it looks like stone with big chocolate chips), use the coal to make torches. Then, when it gets close to dark, dig yourself a hole to hide in from zombies and skeletons. Light it up with torches and seal off all but a one-square window. Spend the night digging out a proper home, make a few stone tools, and then spend the day chopping wood or hunting or spelunking or just exploring.
Should probably clarify, as that came out partially wrong (a bit tired at that point). It took me a minute to figure out because I found out entirely by accident when I noticed sand going through multiple stages during a particularly disinterested click.
He really needs to make a tutorial before it gets released :) I suppose it's not surprising in a quickly-changing alpha build, however.
This took me a while to figure out, since the pickaxe is the key to starting up all the crafting chains, and making the first axe head out of wood isn't very intuitive.
Great idea. Kudos to the creator. I've heard about the game few weeks back, but assumed it is some sort of a viral copy of a Starcraft hack.
Also C64 graphics > New "photo realistic" games...
The game has essentially gone viral at this point. Multiple webcomics are covering it. There's decent coverage on social news sites. Industry rags have picked it up. Industry veterans (I have a friend at Disney Interactive, and another at BioWare) have absolutely taken notice, Valve in particular. Some review sites are seriously considering it as their "game of the year" candidate. This weekend the website (and authentication service) collapsed under load. With some outside help it's up and fine after some refactoring and offloading things to S3. Today he cracked 25,000 unit sales for the day, or about $340K USD in gross revenue.
Yes, he. Until very recently, it was basically a one-man show. There's a few dedicated folks coming on board now, but that's what's humbling. Today, Markus eclipsed my day's compensation in just 88 seconds.