I didn't go to Minecon or anything, but I just came across a video of the opening for it.
Look at the development process of one of the greatest indie titles of all time. Look at how he started with something so small and simple, and gradually built on it until it was complete, but also allowed people to play it in the process. He didn't keep the game to himself and his development team until he felt it was "finished". If he did, we probably wouldn't even be playing Minecraft right now because he may have felt the state of the game now wasn't "complete".
Another good point to take note of is that Notch worked on Minecraft a year and a half before recruiting people to help. Developers on BYOND seem to think they can't start projects until they've got like 3 or 4 people ready to work with them. This is not the case. Actually, I'd be more interested in someone that did already do a lot of work on the project before I joined it. It would make me feel the person was serious about the game, and wasn't just some lazy dude who wants me to make a game for him.
Anyway, the morals of today's story is that:
1. Your games don't have to be a massive RPG game that takes years to create.
2. You don't have to wait until the game is complete or has boatloads of content before you let people play it.
3. You don't have to wait until you assemble a team before you start developing your game.
A lot of projects that are discontinued on BYOND are because of one of the two reasons above. The developer either created a project too complicated for himself, or he never got around to releasing it because he felt the game needed to be 100% complete, or have tons of content.
LEARN FROM NOTCH
ID:121316
 Nov 25 2011, 4:33 pm
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Nov 25 2011, 4:38 pm
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Oasiscircle
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True that! (:
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That's all well and good, but don't do what Notch did and go throughout the entire project without a sense of what the completed product will look like. He created a clusterfuck of a codebase because he didn't have any idea where he wanted to go with it and thus no plan on how to implement systems. He just succumbed to feature creep and his code and its bugs show it.
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So if I'm learning from Notch does that mean I can be extremely racist, call out people who give me free advertisement, use extremely bad and inefficient programming practices, and take long vacations for three-fourths of the year?
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@LordAndrew: Yep. :P
I think Empirez was just highlighting the good practices of Notch. Of course every person has their downsides, otherwise we wouldn't be human. | |
LordAndrew wrote:
use extremely bad and inefficient programming practices How would you know how he program? | |
Magnum2k wrote:
LordAndrew wrote: A lot of modders have managed to unobfuscate Minecraft's source code and the general consensus is that Notch is not a very good programmer at all. | |
Magnum2k wrote:
How would you know how he program? Because there is a team that deobfuscates his decompiled code for modders. That is, until they either get bored or the modders get that modding API and/or access to his SVN that they were promised to be released by 1.0 | |
LordAndrew wrote:
So if I'm learning from Notch does that mean I can be extremely racist, call out people who give me free advertisement, use extremely bad and inefficient programming practices, and take long vacations for three-fourths of the year? If it gets you millions upon millions of sales, go for it. | |
It just goes to show you don't need to be a good programmer to make games.
I'm a terrible programmer - the people who have seen my code tell me it's awful. However, they also said my games were fun. At the end of the day, people play your game based on how fun it is, not on how many bad programming habits you have. People don't give a damn about code as long as they can enjoy playing the game. | |
That was useless.
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Avainer1 wrote:
That was useless. JUST LIKE YO FACE | |
JUST LIKE YOU. YOU ARE SPERM. YOU ARE A WASTE OF A GOOD THING.
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:3 Frog Blog!
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After the first 3 seconds, I was like "not worth it..." So I stopped the video.
Then I thought, "What's not worth it?" so I watch the whole thing, neato! I learned that Minecraft looks very fun, I want a british accent, I want to say Brilliant with the british accent I obtained. Seriously, it did remind me of something forum_account <strikeout>said</strikeout> typed, just make something playable and then you can add a bunch of other content gradually. Minecraft was a Building game and now it's a Builder RPG MMO. Video = A good reminder. :) | |
The only lesson I've learned from Notch is to not air your dirty laundry in public.
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Or step on lava?
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I thought the problem was that the games here were being released too early in development and were generally no good in the first place?
I still believe Minecraft was just a special case. Look at some of the great indie games: Spelunky, Iji, Braid, World of Goo. They are generally released to the public once they are finished or near completion. This is usually because the content that requires it to be fun requires other systems, that may not factor into the game play experience, to be completed. Those games took years to complete too. First of all, Notch took a beloved childhood toy, Lego, and made it into a multiplayer video game. This is what I describe alpha Minecraft as, and the reasoning as to why such an incomplete game was so successful. He also opted with generating a block world with block characters, which cut down the development time drastically. It sounds like Notch took the best route when creating his indie game. But this is a unique situation, how many other indie games have made millions? I also cannot think of any other childhood toys that could translate into a multi-million dollar success story. As forum_account has mentioned in the past: Many BYOND developers quickly start working on their great game idea only to realize during development that the idea is not so great. This applies along with many BYOND developers using their time to analyze why other developers do not create games. I'm doing it right now! | |
Well if you pay attention to the "discontinued" blog posts, you don't see too many people dropping projects that are extremely simple. Look at Kumorii's zombie game. VERY simple, and the game didn't have as much content as it does now when he first released it. Forcing yourself to reach a certain level of content or game play before you release it means more time spent developing the game, which means more time to lose interest. Getting something out there gives you an early sense of accomplishment, and players that take an interest in your game can make constant requests on what they would like to see. It's kind of hard to give that kind of feedback on a game you haven't played yet. You can only give so much feedback on just a written out plan.
Terraria was started in January and released in May - a total of around four months. Sold 432000 copies in a month at like $10 each. That's 4.3 million dollars for four months of work. Sure, they could have waited several more months, but the point is you don't have to. And seeing as how most BYOND games don't have nearly as much quality as Terraria, I don't see why it takes so long. DM dumbs down everything a great deal. The Terraria developers didn't have that luxury, yet they still put out an awesome game in a short amount of time. As for Notch, I'm pretty sure him making what is essentially a 3D Lego game is a huge reason why Minecraft is a success, but I was focusing more on the development process. The way he went about creating it would be better for developers around here. Similar to how Kumorii made his game. Started with a very simple shooter and built upon it - added more objects and scenery, added different types of weapons etc etc. instead of waiting until all that was in the game to release it. | |
Too bad Notch made the world's greatest threat to humanity... Them creepers will get us all!
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