Creator of the uber-successful and ever-popular Minecraft, Marcus "Notch" Persson, stepped back as lead on that game a little while ago, and while his development studio, Mojang, and a few smaller projects do keep him busy, he's also been mulling over what to work on next.
"I want the space game that’s more like Firefly,” he told
PC Gamer. “I want to run around on my ship and have to put out a fire. Like, oh crap, the cooling system failed, I have to put out the fire here.”
He also wants to incorporate a gameplay model similar to the trading sim PC classic, Elite, though as he describes "except done right".
"The goal is to do it the same way I did Minecraft,” he said of the project's potential development. “Just basically have me work on it for a while, and then we’ll add people as needed, and try to charge as soon as possible, because it’s probably going to be [an] open ended sandbox game as well, so it doesn’t need to be completed before people can play it."
I wonder if he's been playing Mass Effect of late as well? A lot of what happens in that game is on your ship, and there's a mild Firefly flavour in BioWare's epic space opera. Either way, it's another sci-fi game (a good thing in my book, if done well), but the question is, where Notch is concerned, can genius strike twice? Or did he just get lucky the first time around?
Drop your thoughts in our Comments section on the potential for any such project.
Posted 11:01am 23/3/12
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Posted 11:18am 23/3/12
Also:
I hope he doesn't make it, cos a space game that takes inspiration from Firefly and contains a trading and exploration angle similar to Elite is skirting rather close to the project I've started working on in my spare time. I don't have an army of people to work on it and millions of dollars though like Notch :(
Posted 11:20am 23/3/12
Posted 11:29am 23/3/12
Khel, just get it playable and release it while working on it.
Chop to it.
Posted 11:49am 23/3/12
Yeah, still just designing stuff atm, its an idea thats been kicking around in my head for years, I've got notebooks full of scribbled notes and all sorts of stuff like that, but its only recently I've found the time and motivation to start real work on it.
I want to get a prototype up and running as quickly as possible as a proof of concept to make sure I'm not just wasting my time, but thats still probably at least a few months away (if not longer), and since I don't have oodles of time to spend on it things will probably move at a rather slow pace.
But my plan wasn't to derail this thread, I just had a bit of a "wtf" moment when I read this since its something I've been thinking about for so long and literally only in the past week or two have started working on seriously. Maybe Mass Effect has everyone's sci-fi juices flowing at the moment
Posted 02:38pm 23/3/12
also i think notch is arrogant and he got lucky with minecraft!!
Posted 02:44pm 23/3/12
I guess theres Eve Online, but thats heavily skewed in the trading direction and not enough in the direction of actually flying around in your ship. Freelancer was pretty fun, but too small scale and not enough to do.
I did actually play X3, but it didn't really appeal to me, it just felt a bit too dense to get into, too much stuff to try and figure out and too complicated when all I wanted to do was fly around in my ship and get into sweet dogfights and explore the galaxy. It also felt pretty cold and impersonal, and was buggy as s***, so all that combined ended up turning me off.
Posted 03:20pm 23/3/12
Faster Then Light
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Posted 04:43pm 23/3/12
http://www.playstarbound.com/
Perhaps Notch saw it and decided to steal the spotight?
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