$250,000-a-day Minecraft strikes indie game gold
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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.
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).
By the way, it has even had TV coverage here in Australia: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/goodgame/video/default.htm?pres=201...
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
In your opinion, does it come down to the overhead of needing the runtime? Something else?
[1]http://www.topcoder.com/ [2]http://bytonic.de/html/jake2.html
I read somewhere that Notch had accrued at least two million in PayPal but can't vouch that it's accurate.
This game is really good.
http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/08/31/wherein_bbot_gets_r...
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.
Can someone please explain this one to me?
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:
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.
Yet.
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.
[1] http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=24213
[2] http://www.geekosystem.com/dwarf-fortress-turing-machine-com...
Blocky 8-bit style? Those graphics would have been cutting edge in 1993, almost a decade after the heyday of 8-bit systems.
There's no reason that graphics of Minecraft's quality shouldn't be blazingly fast on current hardware.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I'm, um, an irregular. (Entered twice, finished once.)
Here's his screen-capture timelapse for the last one, which was a bit over a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1629810
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.
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.
after spending an hour scouring the land trying to find
where I had left my huge mine/home
2) make a compass with 4 iron, 1 redstone (it always points to your spawn location)
I
I R I
ISo 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. :)
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.
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.
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 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.
It's insane to see MC make more than that per day. Poor Toady.
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.
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.
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.
Here's a good start for crafting: http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting
I downloaded the alpha and it's....pretty basic. I understand that it's just an alpha and shouldn't expect anything fantastic, which is fine.
But I'm unable to play the game (I think, unless I've overlooked something). Any ideas?
How does one actually PLAY?
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.
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.
Another possibility is that you're too high up. They seem to cluster in the valleys, the "mountains" sometimes almost empty.
I just need a HINT. I have no idea what to do! I've seen one day and one night and I am in the same place. Am I looking for something?
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).
Unless i have to punch it 10000 times, in which case, fuck this.
I have a macbook so I just kept clicking. Doh!
And then I realize you have to keep it pressed.
He really needs to make a tutorial before it gets released :) I suppose it's not surprising in a quickly-changing alpha build, however.
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.
http://minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Crafting
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.
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.
I wonder how many lines of code this is...