January 2012
4 posts
A poll on letting us snoop
We have no idea how you’re playing the Minecraft.
Right now, the only way we can figure out roughly what people are doing with the game is to track logins. Once you’re logged in, we have no idea what happens.
I was thinking it would be awesomely cool to add some kind of player tracking to the game. This would work by having the game connect to minecraft.net and send some anonymous...
Guide to clothes, by hole count
1 hole: Sock
2 holes: Leggings
3 holes: Underwear
4 holes: Shirt
(god, this blog is dying, isn’t it?)
Coding skill and the decline of stagnation
I am a decent programmer. I know a decent amount of computer science theory, I can type correct code fairly easy. I don’t let my classes expand too much. But I still struggle some with math, and I have a tendency to have too many cross-dependencies in my code.
I used to think I was an awesome programmer. One of the best. After I made a game in the first programming lesson in school, I got...
xcom
xcom xcom xcom
/ xcom
December 2011
7 posts
Top ten movies of 2011!
No, just kidding. Instead, I will ramble about working in teams.
Some people have asked me why we don’t hire a lot more programmers to work on Minecraft. The answer is that I think that would be an incredibly bad thing to do.. or at least that it WOULD have been an incredibly bad thing to do. One reason why Minecraft has managed to get as much personality as it does it that it’s only...
Mojang Has Never Supported SOPA
Looks to Internet Community & Fellow Tech Leaders to Destroy Legislation We All Hate
STOCKHOLM, Sweden. (Dec. 23, 2011) - Mojang has never supported SOPA, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” currently working its way through U.S. Congress.
“Overzealous and vaguely formulated attempts to fight online piracy is of the scariest developments in online policies in recent times, which...
Ludum Dare is a wonderful thing
I’ve talked about it before, and I’ll talk about it again. Ludum Dare is an amazing thing. It’s basically a recurring (three times per year? Uh. Something like that) competition where you’re supposed to make a game from scratch in 48 hours, and it just happened again this weekend. Everyone starts at the same time when the theme gets announced, and then you try to make an as...
Santa vs Cthulhu until 7 am
I’ve been avoiding doing any kind of work recently in an attempt to reset my creative batteries. I’ve mostly been playing Zelda. Then I played Hyper Princess Pitch and started playing around with the idea of making a Christmas game myself. Naturally, I started with the title. Santa vs Cthulhu.
The original idea was to make a real time strategy game where you play as either Santa or...
We're hiring. You should work here.
We’re expanding!
Exciting new projects, a very successful first year, and a much bigger new office means we’re going to grow into a slightly larger company. Right now we’re about 12-15 people, depending on how you count, and we want to grow to “a bit larger”.
To apply for a job, go here:...
Would you like some physical LEGO Minecraft?
Some clever people came up with some concepts for LEGO Minecraft kits. We thought it was pretty darn cool and talked to LEGO about it, and now it’s up for on their community site where people can vote for it and show LEGO if they want it or not.
If you do want it to happen, simply go here and click the green “support” button: http://lego.cuusoo.com/ideas/view/4038
Och med dom orden så passar jag micken.
As of yesterday, Jens Bergensten is the new lead developer on Minecraft. He will have the final say in all design decisions, so he will kinda sorta become my boss, I guess. I’ve promised him to not pull rank. ;)
We’ve been working together on Minecraft for a year now, and I’m amazed at how much in synch we two are when it comes to how to design the game. And when we don’t...
November 2011
11 posts
I love Team Fortress 2
Back before the Orange Box, I kept hyping TF2 to all my friends. I had played a lot of TF and TFC back in the day, and I knew TF2 would be the greatest thing ever. My friends humored me and got it on the beta with me. And my god was it awesome. It was awesomer than awesome!
Way later, I went through this period of not really enjoying TF2 as much as I had. After spending hundreds of hours on a...
Kelvin is awesome. Celsius and Fahrenheit are...
Some time many years ago, we decided to measure something that has a zero value on a scale where zero isn’t at the zero value. A temperature of no heat at all is -273 and -460 in degrees Celsius and degrees Fahrenheit respectively. This makes no sense. None.
In Kelvin, a total lack of heat is exactly 0 K. This makes sense. The lack of distance is exactly 0 meters. And 0 yards. And 0...
Day 4.5 - The Party
After some 45 minutes of sleep and a huge plate of nachos (the Nacho Mama at the Mandalay Bay is very, very good), we went over to the media suite to warm up.
And that’s all I can post. I try to keep this blog somewhat PG13.
Day 4 - The End
I am incredibly tired right now, so this might be a bit short. ;)
Breakfast was at 8 am, being filmed by CNN. People were looking tired, but happy, and me and Jakob had bacon with far too much Tabasco sauce on. Then I went and did an interview with CNN, finishing with playing some Minecraft next to a fan. I went back to signing stuff for two hours.
Then there was the charity lunch. The food was...
Day 3 - The Launch
After some seven hours of sleep (nice), we went to the wrong room for breakfast. Confusion started setting in until someone figured it out. Breakfast in the USA apparently consisted of cake bread with peanut butter and jam, and extremely crispy bacon. I am not complaining.
We went to rehearse the opening session, and I got mic:ed up by what I think was CNN, who are filming something about...
Day 2 - The Setup
I woke up at 3 am after getting about three and a half hours of sleep. I lingered in bed for three hours or so, but never managed to go back to sleep. Too many thoughts, too much jetlag. The sunset was very beautiful from our hotel room. At about 7 am or so, Elin and I called our family members, and we all gathered in our suite before going down to eat breakfast. And let me tell you, breakfast...
Day 1 - The Arrival
The phone alarm rang at half past seven in the morning. Two hours later we were at Arlanda Airport and met up with the rest of the Mojang Team. We did some last minute shopping (power plug converters and toothpaste), had breakfast, then got on the flight to Heathrow Airport where we bought even more power plug converter thingies.
The second flight went all the way to Las Vegas. I have to say,...
Soon.
(First of all, sorry about the masturbation joke in my last post. It’s currently my favorite joke. :D)
It’s 10 pm. In 10.5 hours, we will leave for Arlanda Airport. Soon thereafter, we will fly to Las Vegas!
The last few weeks have been incredibly stressful and emotional in many ways, and I feel so relieved to finally have a finished version of Minecraft to release to the world...
Zing.
I visited my doctor last week, and he told me I had to stop masturbating. I asked him why, surely it’s not dangerous. He said it was distracting him.
Inspiration, motivation, stress, and abandonment
A normal project for me goes through three stages. I will summarize and review them because I’m waiting for a very slow script to finish and have nothing better to do! :D
Inspiration! Ah! A new idea! I think I know how I could do an awesome thing, or there’s a new aspect I want to try with an existing feature. Development speed is amazingly high and new ideas get thrown around. Some...
Nervousness
Next week is MineCon week. That means we’ll release the full version of Minecraft (which will be called “Minecraft”, and have a version number of 1.0. The current version is “Minecraft Beta”). We’ll keep working on Minecraft for a long time after the full release, but it’s a huge milestone.
That milestone also means people might start reviewing the game....
October 2011
10 posts
MineCon is sold out!
Yep. It’s sold out. Wow. :D
Important news regarding chickens and eggs
Ok, so.. For a long time, I’ve claimed that obviously the egg came before the chicken, as the first chicken had to be hatched from something.
We had a discussion about it today at work, and Jens contested that claim. So now I’ve revised my position.
Chicken can lay eggs without them being fertilized. This means the eggs are made up of non-genetically-mixed material, and that the...
I hate "free to play".
Ok, that headline it a bit overly inflammatory. While I am sceptical of the free to play trend, what I hate is the wording “free to play”.
The reason some people are moving to this area is that free to play showed up in the “social gaming” segment (facebook) and made a few people (zynga) very rich. It’s been tried in other genres in other markets with decent...
Battlefield 3 is looking amazing.
Ok, so I missed out on the Beta, but everything I’ve seen looks amazingly fun. Like ridiculously so. Even the bugged out crawling animations look hilarious.
While I think some serious competition to Steam is a good thing for everyone involved, especially the customers, I’m a bit skeptical of Origin. That said, I’d GLADLY start using it just to be able to play Battlefield 3.
...
Happy birthday, us!
One year ago, we started Mojang. Back then, Minecraft had sold between half a million and one million copies, and now we’re up to almost four million copies sold, we’re expanding to two new platforms, and we’re getting good progress done with our new game. In one month, we’re going to Las Vegas to celebrate the full release of Minecraft with our fans. And we’re...
Pre releases and Adventure Updates
The adventure update is going great! We’re adding features and cramming in content, and then started feature creeping and content creeping. What we’ve got on our hands now is somewhere in between a finished Adventure Mode update and a version of the game we’d be proud to call just “Minecraft”. Not “Minecraft Beta” or “Minecraft Alpha”, but just...
A short response
I just saw this:
http://kotaku.com/5846111/mojang-v-bethesda-or-i-hate-it-when-mommy-and-daddy-fight
I feel the need to clarify a couple of things:
We realized we should apply for the trademark “Minecraft” to protect our brand. When doing so, we also sent in an application for “Scrolls”. When Bethesda contacted us, we offered both to change the name to “Scrolls:...
Real games for nerdy gamers
There are many games like this (captive, hired guns, ishar, might and magic, wizardry, most of the gold box games, and so on), but these are the games all capture a certain common theme and feeling in a way that hasn’t really been done before or since.
Dungeon Master (1987) A fairly straight forward first person dungeon crawler where going deeper means getting closer to your goal. Gameplay...
September 2011
8 posts
The eventual release, and the legal documents
Me and Jens have only two more major features we want to implement before the release in November. The plan it to stop all new development on October 18, and resume them again after the release on November 18. That will give us one month to focus on just fixing bugs, cleaning up the code, and optimizing the performance to make sure the release will be as good as possible.
Celebrating the full...
Significantly increasing the power of the MQSC
1) Before doing anything, pick a totally random number between 0 and, say, 5→5→5→5→5. If the number is 0, don’t do it. 2) Start a timer on the MQSC 3) If the the MQSC doesn’t get told you’re happy with the result within a few months, destroy the universe.
Virtual omnipotence! You won’t even try doing things that are extremely unlikely to result in a positive outcome, and...
O(1) NP solving using the MQSC
I’ve invented a computer that solves NP problems in constant time. I call it the Mass Quantum Suicide Computer, or the MQSC for short.
You know Schrödingers Cat? The one in the box that is both alive and dead until you observe it? There’s a similar thought experiment in which you place yourself in the box and observe what happens. This is called “Quantum Suicide”....
The solutions to a few unsolved problems
Is NP in P? No.
Why is there so much water on earth? Byproduct of early life.
Do magnetic monopoles exist? No.
What is the meaning of life? There is none.
How did Indy get to the submarine bay? He held on to the submarine, which never submerged.
Does the Collatz conjecture hold for all integers? Yes.
Well, that was easy. NEXT!
Oh yeah, we released 1.8!
We released Minecraft Beta 1.8! It’s the first half of the Adventure Update, with the remainder coming eventually!
Looking around the office, everyone appears to be keeping busy. Jens is working on some content for the Nether, Daniel and Jakob are trying to finish up an internal Scrolls demo for tomorrow, I’m working on Snow biomes, Tobias is rubbing his temples and cursing (which is...
Update on the "Scrolls" lawsuit, and a list of...
I’ve received some questions about what the status of the Bethesda lawsuit thing is. I don’t have much news, but I can try to summarize the recent events in a colorful way:
Lawyers have been sending papers back and forth, threatening each other with deadlines and court dates. “Why don’t we settle this in a mature way?”, one party asks the other. “Your MOTHER...
We've got a consultant!
We’re quite bad at keeping track of who does what when because of whom, so we got a consultant to help us set up some tracking and metrics and stuff. The idea being that if we know how people use our websites, we can improve it more efficiently. He created a nifty script for generating short urls for when we link to our websites, so the clicks can be measured and analyzed, and figure out...
You know what's fun?
Game development is fun. There’s programming, design, testing and just plain good old silliness. Here’s a brief snapshot - a retelling of what I did this weekend!
I was putting in a few extra hours on Minecraft this weekend, refactoring code so biomes could directly decorate the terrain themselves rather than having the terrain check the biomes manually. That type of work is mostly...
August 2011
12 posts
Then there's The Prank
One early summer morning, Carl was on vacation and I was checking my email. Lydia, who was organizing the flights to PAX and such, had emailed all of us, asking what kind of food we wanted on the flight. She listed all the options, and one of them was “Bland”. That amused me immensely. It’s like having an option that says “over cooked” or “a bit on the salty...
Why no Steam, Notch?
At PAX, I got asked why we’re not on Steam with Minecraft, and I had to answer the question straight out for the first time. So I’ll repeat what I said on here, because openess is awesome.
Steam is the best digital distribution platform I’ve ever seen. I’ve spent incredible amounts of money on it, and I own a crazy amount of games on it. It runs great, offers great...
Somehow, we're putting together a party
After a looong day at the booth, we had a dinner with Jinx. I had a huge steak and something called a “knockout”, and now we’re putting together an awesome party tonight.
The only problem is that we haven’t invited anyone outside the company yet, and I don’t know how many people the venue will hold. ;-D
I will be tweeting about it during the day, but if you’re...
Dear diary,
We’ve been in Seattle for three days now. The first day was just arriving and eating lunch before crashing in bed. The next two days were meetings and planning with Microsoft, working out some details for the XBox version of Minecraft and getting to know their team a bit better. Today, we did a brief drop-by at Bungie to say hi (but not to Valve! Why not? I miss those guys), then went to the...
I thought of something
What with all these fancy new web services like imgur and twitter and tumblr and all that, I should start my own, called notchr, for people who are not quite convinced yet.
Prelude of the Chambered
I made a game in 48 hours this weekend, for the Ludum Dare competition.
It’s an action based dungeon crawler with six levels, four boss fights, and plenty of secrets and loot. It takes about 20-30 minutes to beat the game, and if you die, you need to start over from the beginning.
Click here to play now!
Hey, Bethesda! Let's settle this!
I am back, and I am excited.
Marriage has been wonderful so far, and nobody sabotaged my computer while I was gone.
The only negative thing going on at this moment is the Scrolls trademark lawsuit nonsense, and I think I came up with the perfect solution:
Remember that scene in Game of Thrones where Tyrion chose a trial by battle in the Eyrie? Well, let’s do that instead! I challenge...
Wedding Weekend!
Hi everyone! I’m getting married to ez tomorrow, and I thought we’d celebrate by giving one free copy of Minecraft to everyone who buys the game!
How does it work, you ask?
Well, if you buy a copy of the game (not a gift code), you get a free gift code added to your account. You can see the gift codes you have by going to http://www.minecraft.net/profile/ Tell your...
You should go to MineCon!
http://minecon.mojang.com/
We’ll be celebrating the community, celebrating the release of the full version of Minecraft, doing competitions, listening to interesting people talk, and just generally having a great time. Tickets are 99 dollars if you buy them before October.
In other marketing news, we finally got Steve Heads for sale! http://mojang.com/2011/08/12/new-merch/
Bethesda are suing us, here's the full story!
A lot of people want more details about what is going on, so here is everything I know:
First of all, I love Bethesda. I assume this nonsense is partly just their lawyers being lawyers, and a result of trademark law being the way it is.
About half a year ago, our lawyers recommended us to register “Minecraft” as a trademark, so we did. I had voted against it initially, but we did it...