Minecraft Indie Game

[MAGNUS-8M]

Anyone heard of Minecraft? (Sorry if there was a topic on it - I searched for it here, but did not find one on it, only a few Blog Story Discussions showing artwork made in it.) I've seen some updates from as far back as 2009, but I only recently found it at the end of last July. The only 'bad' part is that, while the Classic version is free, the actual 'official build' is currently 9.95-euros(which came out to $13.50 when I bought it). The classic version allows building with blocks, but almost no interaction with them.

I'm usually not a fan of sandbox games, but I love this game just for the idea of crafting everything you use. You start out with your own two hands, punch some trees down to gain chunks of wood, use wood to create wooden-blocks, and use wooden blocks to create a workbench - which pretty much allows you to create everything else. Use wooden tools to harvest some stone, use stone to create smelting furnaces and stone tools, use stone tools to harvest iron ore for creating steel.

(Small video of what you can do in Minecraft - the video is a bit tongue-in-cheek, so don't take him too seriously.)



The other interesting aspect is that your only main enemy is darkness. Whether it's from the night or the darkness of the very mines you make or the caves you find, darkness spawns monsters. Currently two types cannot survive natural sunlight, and will ignite once morning comes, while the other two can survive sunlight and continue to be a threat until you move far enough for them to disappear. So, using sticks and coal that you mine from caves, you can throw some torches around the area to at least prevent monsters from spawning in your own home and mining systems, although they will not destroy monsters by themselves.

I have a lot of fun just chiseling out my own little home within a small mountain, as well as discovering existing cave systems and mining them out. It barely runs on my system, so if you're interested, make sure to at least play the classic version first, and remember that it runs slightly better than the purchased version, which includes dynamic lighting and enemy-AI and an 'infinte' world that keeps being built randomly in the background. The classic version ran fine on my system, even with 'stereo-3D' enabled, but I have to kind of set the fog and draw distance levels low to use it.

[StAwesome]

if i had 12 bucks that wasnt already dedicated to other m, i would buy (the full version of) minecraft in a heartbeat. sadly, i probably wont be able to buy it untill beta, and im not at all willing to pay 30 for it. its a GREAT game, but it just doesnt have the content appropriate for that kind of money, it would be like if little big planet was released, but the ONLY levels they had were made by other players. i can appreciate his work on the tool, but in the end, its the players that make the game fun, that make the game a game.

i dunno, thats just upsetting to me.

a neat thing to do though (but you will need the full game for every person playing) is to build labyrinths, castles, and temples, and have some friends join in a game, put an object in these places for them to find (mushrooms or rare ores for caves, flowers or something else for castles or temples) and let them find them as a quest.

it takes HOURS to build a single good level, but when you finish, its really fun to put your friends through. i had one where i told them to "find where the trees grow from nothing, the entrance will be guarded by their fallen brothers"
which basically meant "look for a place where trees are growing from rockside, there is a door nearby made from chopped up wood"

so they went seeking this place, figured out the riddle, and busted down the door. that of course flooded the first cavern, and so they had to hold their breath and attempt to dig into the first chamber. basically, after a long while of getting lost in the maze, they found the mushroom, but not realizing how evil i was, destroyed a block that was stopping them from getting to it... it was also stopping a big leak. the water bust in on them, and they had to either try and dig for the mushroom, and hope they made it out in time, or swim as fast as they could up, hoping to find the source of the water.

they took the cowards way out, and emerged on the other side of the lake in a cavern.

theres a TON of stuff i could tell you though, weve done some interesting things with minecraft, it really is an amazing tool.

[MAGNUS-8M]

Haha, wow, that all does sound pretty cool! I kind of agree though, for its content, 13.50 is a bit much, but for some reason I really like it. I think it's the survival aspect of it all, as well as the creativity, because normally I don't like FPS games or sandbox games, but I really like the survival mode of this one.

I haven't tried doing anything related to multiplayer yet though, but it sounds pretty neat. All I've done is do the survival mode, which I think gives a bit more 'content' in the way of trying to quickly amass enough materials to survive the fall of the first night, not giving you anything at all to aid you in that except *maybe* spawning a random environment that supports that idea, and slowly building a home into a defense fortress of some kind. And I kind of like that feeling of being at a disadvantage, and slowly overcoming it.

[StAwesome]

its not fully functional yet, but the final release will have multiplayer survival, which should be awesome

id just love for them to be really aggressive and come in huge hordes, like a mix of left 4 dead and a castle defense game.

and imagine if caves were filled with them too, you could be fleeing from zombies, only to bust down a brick to reveal a room full of them!
yes, survival with friends should ramp up the fun significantly

[Nintend()\/\/|\|312]

I've just recently gotten the game and I have to say that it is very, very interesting. I just wanted to post the first of a couple videos posted by Seananners on YouTube that got me interested in the game.

[MAGNUS-8M]

It's funny how seananners is *just* getting into the game at the same time that 'X'(I forget his user name, he always refers to himself as just "X") has basically quit the game(and on a really lousy note too). Glad to know someone else likes it though! Are you travelling around a lot, or basically staying in the same place near your mining caves like I kind of am..?

I think I actually play this game, off and on, every single day. There are times when I'm annoyed with it, and I AM really put off when I die in a place that I can't get most or all of my stuff back, but just journeying back to retrieve your stuff can be fun. I love this game's atmosphere, quiet, but very pointed in making you 'afraid' both in terms of sounds and situations/darkness. In one sense, the zombies are very vocal in bothering you even if they can't get to you, and knowing the skeletons have a long range weapon on hand makes the clinking noise they make kind of jarring when you hear it first before you actually see them. And knowing creepers make no noise except for walking can almost make you paranoid.. XD

I need to move onto another area; every new cave system I find ends up going back down into the same caves I've already mostly explored, which is cool and all, but it also means I'm not getting too many new resources. I'm still having fun just urbanizing my little mountain though, so it'll probably still be a long while before I move on. But it's difficult to pull up stakes and move when your spawn point is still more or less fixed...

[Nintend()\/\/|\|312]

I'm not travelling around too much at the moment. I'm mostly just expanding my underground cave system, mining more diamonds, building my floating sky fortress and skyway system and filling up the moat around my beach-side house with lava.

One of the things I love about the game that I haven't found anywhere else is the sense of claustrophobia I got when I went on my first mining adventure for diamonds. After digging for a few minutes and realizing how deep I was underground, I started thinking about what I would do if I got lost without a pick-axe somewhere and couldn't find my way out or what would happen if a zombie followed me down my mine, killed me and I couldn't find my body again. Being able to get lost in a game and having it heighten the experience is something I find very impressive.

[MAGNUS-8M]

Haha, I know... it's funny, I light up areas habitually, but every now and then a particular area will still spawn monsters even with just a hint of shadow, and I'll suddenly turn around in-game and almost jump out of my chair when I come face to face with some kind of monster I didn't expect.. XD I've been mostly okay with finding my stuff after a death, except that once I fell into a DEEP pit lined with magma at the bottom(absolutely no way out, save for climbing a lava-fall of all things @___@ ), and there was once that a creeper killed me within two squares of magma, and two or three slots of my stuff fell in. And then just recently I had trouble getting out of an underwater cave, and drowned near a current, so half of my stuff fell to the bottom of the water, but the other half drifted into an underground cave and disappeared forever. (It's weird how in some people's videos, they could walk for MILES going back to get their stuff, and it'll all be there, but in my game, it seems like my stuff disappears in 10~20 minutes or something.)

Sounds cool, floating island sounds pretty ambitious(just building a house with a roof, I realize I need a lot of dirt scaffolding to get anywhere with it). I actually wanted to try using lava as a cheap light source around my area, maybe put some glass over top of it like some kind of recessed lighting in the ground, put it in strips around buildings rather than all over the place. But after going all the way down, retrieving five buckets of lava, and setting up an attempt to create a lava-well like you can with water(I don't think you can with lava now, though), I accidentally broke a wall right by some water, and instantly turned it all to obsidian.


EDIT: Found a program that lets you render your current World(s). In case you're curious, here's mine: http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/6677 ... ledayp.png

[LordTyroxx]

Oh my God!! I've been stuck on this game for about a week! Someone save me from this addictive game! Seriously i didn't know what all the hype was all about recently until I tried it for myself. It was mac/pc/linux so I had no issues there. Mac supported games FTW! It's amazing how simple the game is, but still has countless possibilities for what you can do in it! There is supposed to be a "Hell" release update to this game for halloween and it adds a new enemy and new blocks.

It would be cool to have a Gonintendo server for minecraft. People can request the information (for security) and we could all build things together! (kinda like that drawball experiment if anyone remembers that). I can't host the server because hosting a minecraft server on a mac is beyond me. I think we should definitely look into this!

[MAGNUS-8M]

It's certainly getting a LOT more popular than from even when I bought it a few months ago; good to know a lot of people are enjoying it! I miss having weekly updates, though.

I've done so much in my World 1, but it always feels like there's a large amount of stuff to do. I think most of it is based on that curiosity of what's in this next cave/area, as well as admiring what the random-generator creates. I'm almost afraid to move around too much though, if I load a lot of areas, I'll have less chance of finding biomes near my area once they're actually implimented(I might have to just start a World 2 or soemthing instead).

A server sounds kind of cool(if someone would actually agree to hosting such a thing), hopefully the SMP server code is a lot more stable on the next release. Collabing in a dangerous world would be much more interesting than just using infinite blocks to make whatever.

[LordTyroxx]

Warning: Large File!
http://www.fusedcreations.com/adam/colr ... er_013.jpg


Penny arcade looks like they had a random world and let people loose in it. Their world looks really amazing too! That's what i'm thinking a lot of us Gonintendo-ers could accomplish. I wonder how many people on GoNintendo play minecraft regularly.

But we probably should wait until minecraft is out of alpha. They might make multiplayer to serve our purposes in a future update.

[MAGNUS-8M]

Wow, that's huuuuuuge! Very awesome. I'm not sure if we'd all be so artistically inclined(mostly I don't have the best sense of planning for 3D sculptures and the like), but it'd be great to try some time. It's cool to see what PA did with it...I thought they might have liked it giving the game two quick comics about it, but it's cool that they even set up a server for their audience.

I started camping out a little ways to the south off from my main island home(although it is a very big island), and in one of the caves of my temporary home, I finally found my first record just today. The record player sure puts out a lot of volume for a long distance, kind of made my home base sound like some ominous dungeon.. XD

[UncleBibby]

I don't mean to be a Indie Hipster Stereotype, but I started playing this game a few months before the gaming media got infatuated with it. I haven't played it for a while, mainly because I'm not the kind of guy that enjoys enormous-3D-environment games, especially really hard ones. The creativity that it allows is freakin' amazing though. Did you know somebody made a 16 bit computer using only the blocks in the game?

When the infinite-world generator gets a 'creative' mode (that has an infinitely-filled inventory for making it easier to create things), I'll definitely get back into it.

[MAGNUS-8M]

Alright, the new update is out....and I have to say, what I believed was true definately is -- don't take ANYTHING valuable to 'Nether'. The worst I've done was have some fried-fish and some steel pickaxes(okay, ALSO the majority of my arrows and bow, a steel sword, and some basics like torches). Nether is a terrrrrible terrible place. I thought the ghasts would stay to a certain area and be at least a LITTLE rare. I was wrong... haha. Seriously...I even tried to barricade myself, but of course, their blasts can OBLITERATE anything in their way, so as long as they can see you, they can explode your defenses and set you on fire. If there's anything 'expensive' to take along with you, let it be a steel bucket full of water.......except you can't, according to the Wiki. So if you're set on fire in Nether, you're basically dead, and all your stuff is immediately gone.

I did find that, yes, you don't REALLY need a diamond pickaxe to create an obsidian gate: just get one bucket of water, some dirt maybe, and many many buckets of lava. Use the dirt to contain the mess(mostly water spilloff, but lava as well if you're not quick enough) as well as use for scaffolding for the water. Apparently applying water directly to lava causes the lava to disappear now, not turn immediately into obsidian, so you need to have a dirt column built up near where you want to place the lava block so you can have the water spill out onto it. And from there, you can easily create the obsidian gate you need without any diamond pickaxes...although I did get one myself to clean up some past mistakes when I accidentally created obsidian on the surface.

Nether gates apparently spawn a second gate automatically, simply because you can exit the Nether using the opposite side of the gate you used to enter. I built a gate on top of my mountain house rooftop, but I came back out on the ground just a little to the northwest.

Some of my areas have taken on a slightly autumn look, others near my main house appear as a more lush green, but the differences haven't been drastic enough yet to make any major differences(like snow or whatever). I need to start a new World 2 to play around with, since it will have a fresh random-generation.

Mobs of both animals and enemies are increased heavily. Hordes and hordes of mobs seem to inhabit where ever you go. I came out of my 'back Nether gate' and into a swarm of 8 skeletons - not exaggerating. And even then, there were still a larger amount of creepers and zombies everywhere... so ridiculous. They said they wanted this game harder, and I think it definately is when it comes to the size of mobs.

Fishing makes string valuable; bows have no durability, but fishing poles do, so they CAN break. What's good is that fish are so much more edible than even bread. Raw, they fill one heart; cooked, I think about four or three and a half. Bread is close to cooked fish, but takes so long to grow in comparison. Plus fishing is kinda fun. =P

It's funny how much I was able to find in just an hour or so with the new update, but already it's made things fresh....if a bit incredibly dangerous. I really need to work on grabbing only what I need to take into the Nether, and setting up a better chest system to make things more organized before venturing in. Oy. Hope everyone else is having fun, but I think this is going to be a lot more difficult for me than for others.

[LordTyroxx]

I lost my Diamond pickaxe to the stupid nether! I freaking hate the Ghast! *grumble* I actually didn't expect it to be this hard, but their aim is pretty good and they are terrifying in groups. I'll play more tomorrow (or later today, it's 4 am right now). But right now, i'm tired, cranky, and need to sleep off my rage of losing my pickaxe.

[MAGNUS-8M]

Well, from what I'm hearing now, there is apparently a glitch that causes ALL of your inventory to disappear on death no matter where you are, so I guess it's not just Nether. Which is good, but it doesn't give me too much of more hope I suppose. =P

The worst part is that, I'm hearing there's a good chance that those brittle-gold-blocks found only in Nether will be part of the recipe for constructing permanent light sources(the lanterns), which really sucks. I was hoping it would actually be gold bars itself, since gold is nearly USELESS otherwise(I thought it could be built something like 3 gold, in the shape of a bucket design, with a single coal in the middle). If that's true, it'll make new games a lot more difficult since you need to get at least two buckets and access to both water and lava in order to build a gate to Nether doing it the difficult way. I did hear that existing placed torches will be 'converted' to lamps once the lamp update is made, so our existing worlds should be okay until you start going places, but still. It really makes me wonder how long torches will last once they're made like that...

[LordTyroxx]

this is when you start stockpiling torches. If lanterns are stackable (and i couldn't see why they wouldn't be) i wonder if all the inventory torches turn into lanterns. If so, i'll start making sets now.

Also, about the pigzombiemen... They pretty much suck if you accidentally attack one. I wanted to know if they would drop that sword, but all i did was die. this game CHEATS!

PS:


Yes, that's me.

[MAGNUS-8M]

Oh, that was yours I saw on deviantArt? Not bad, definately "creepy" XD (terrible pun rimshot).

Well, I did successfully die in Nether, and returned to find all of my stuff, so the bug IS fixed now, thankfully(a little late though). Still surprised I made it back. One of the advantages to building a portal up at a high elevation is that you're thrown into a teeny tiny cave away from all of the maddness, and if you're able to see where you are, you can potentially mine DOWN to the brittle gold instead of climb your way up. The downside is that you can fall down VERY easy(I mean you only need a ghast to explode your 'floor' out from underneath you), and getting back up to your portal can be verrrry difficult.

As far as I can tell though, cobblestone seems impervious to ghast flames/explosions. In fact, I'd guess that only the weak blocks like glass, sand, gravel, and of course the Nether-based blocks are demolished by it. So I'm trying my best to build a safe walk way through Nether, but as many ghast as there are, it's nearly impossible. I really should just throw up my hands and put it on peaceful, but where's the fun in that? :p

[LordTyroxx]

Oh, that was yours I saw on deviantArt? Not bad, definately "creepy" XD (terrible pun rimshot).

My picture is on deviant art? Where? I never uploaded it from there. It went straight from my iphone to my computer and hosted on skitch. My identity has been stolen!

And i realized that if you attack a pigman right where you come out of the portal, go ahead and build another obsidian portal far away in your main world. I would get trapped and instantly killed by 20 pigmen when i warped. Not cool. All i did was light the ground on fire so i could see. the pigman walked into the fire and started attacking me.

[MAGNUS-8M]

Oh, that was yours I saw on deviantArt? Not bad, definately "creepy" XD (terrible pun rimshot).

My picture is on deviant art? Where? I never uploaded it from there. It went straight from my iphone to my computer and hosted on skitch. My identity has been stolen!

Oh, no, I looked at the pictures again and I realized it was a different Creeper mask, sorry. (Those pics were of a person walking around in a park, to try to simulate the look of a creeper walking about aimlessly, but still looking directly at you.) For some reason I thought it was the same one... X_x;

I haven't had too much trouble from the pig zombies myself. It's just mainly the difficulty I have with sooooo many ghasts just appearing and reappearing out of nowhere.

I also saw that I have a third portal in the real world now, the latter two of which spawned entirely on their own. I'm guessing it's because I stepped into or out of the portal from a different direction, but I'm not sure how that created a second extra portal. I'm expecting another one, sort of like going through the four cardinal directions, but none of them can be accessed individually of course; there's still only one exit portal in Nether, so I always reappear in the real world through that same second-gate(which I'm building a 'barn' out of bloodstone to make sure no enemies can get me when I exit like they did the first time....and then I'll set it on fire for effect :D ).

[TYFIGHTER]

A few of my friends are OBSESSED with this game!!! It looks like so much fun, but I already have limited gaming time as it is, so I don't want to get obsessed too. But I'd be lying if I said I don't plan on getting it in the future.

[MAGNUS-8M]

It's a good game, it just sometimes feels like you don't have much to do anymore....but right now, that's because I'm hitting a major roadblock: I noticed lately, after the new update, that my computer was lagging BAD(especially in Nether), and I've come to find out it's taking 600~800MB of RAM to run it. My old WinXP laptop has 1GB(and that's upgraded from its original 512MB). Yeah...computer's not too happy about it. I might have to even put the game off until I'm "magically" able to buy another computer one day(spfft, that'll be forever).

Neat to see that Notch has added in-game support for texture-packs. I'd like to make my own if I could some day when I'm not busy. We'll see...

[DrewHiggins]

Anyone interested in playing online can play on my server: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s47iJ8jHblQ

[MAGNUS-8M]

The new update is interesting...I'm sure some of the people who hate stairs will like the new half-blocks made of mostly-matching materials, not to mention some of them use less materials in making them of course. Sandstone half blocks use up a lot of sand to make, but so long as I'm not making a second castle entirely out of them, it shouldn't be too bad.

The beds....oh ho man. First time using the bed: instant nightmare. In order to use a bed, you MUST be in FULL LIGHTING. Even if there is a small amount of darkness, using the bed will instantly summon either a skeleton or a zombie RIGHT NEXT TO YOU. They'll be still at first(so far), so you might get a second to attack before they do, but you can imagine what I thought after the screen faded, but instead of morning I'm standing right next to a zombie in the middle of the night just STARING at me. I find it really funny though, so I kind of hope this 'bug' stays in. It's actually a bit realistic...if you tried to sleep out in the open in a monster-filled area, you more or less SHOULD expect to wake up when a monster comes walking by.

I'm much more interested in the second function of beds that is not implemented yet: spawn-point setting. There are a lot of people doing Let's Plays of the game who eventually decide to live thousands of blocks away from their spawn point, only to die and need to rush back to their stuff later. Once the new version of the beds is implimented, Minecraft should have a much different feel, where you have less of a sense of dread, maybe even encourage farther travel as long as you've got the means to get a bed later on.

Crippling Bug: After using Minecraft for an hour or two, creating a new world, converting my first world to the new save format, upon reopening Minecraft a few hours later, the game FROZE at the 'Done Loading' screen after logging in. I'm not sure if the new client's 'Force Update' button would have worked, but after reading some tips on the forums, I found that simply renaming the ".minecraft" folder temporarily, then restarting Minecraft caused it to work correctly, then copying over all of my personal/save/texture files worked as well. So make sure to try that if it seems to not work for you afterward.

Anyone interested in playing online can play on my server: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s47iJ8jHblQ

Sounds interesting, I haven't played multiplayer yet myself, though. I guess I'm a little worried my computer might not take it, since Single Player mode is still a bit laggy for me on this laptop. Maybe I'll give it a try sometime..

[LordTyroxx]

Recently, me and a few friends have been setting up a minecraft server. We plan on making this a pretty big deal. (as soon as it gets bigger, we'll purchase a domain name and Dedicated Server. I have a friend that knows java really well, so he'll be making custom mods for our server. I'm working on the website at the moment.
http://web.mac.com/alexray90/TheGoldenA ... /Home.html (temporary site url )

If you want to do any testing on our server just pm me and I'll get you set up. It would help us out a bunch.