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Comment by LarsDu88 | Hacker News Reader

Folks underestimate how incredibly skilled Notch was and is. Unfortunately ludum dare has taken down its historical compo pages, but I remember that he had several games built from scratch in 24 hours which were mind boggling impressive.

One had a full 3d rendering engine implemented in Dartlang written in 48 hours. Another was a minecraft top down rpg clone.

Dude is the Bobby Fischer of tech

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He also wrote Wurm Online with Rolf Jansson, all in Java OpenGL. Was a bit of a mess of a game but it still has an engaged community.

Yup.... if you look at Minecraft Classic or one of the similar early versions' code..... it's quite advanced. It's conceptually fairly simple but the game just has so many small nice things which are taken for granted but are not trivial to implement.

It's no surprise that almost all of the iconic things about Minecraft was created in the first few years by Notch.... everything else afterwards is just polishing it and adding fluff.

I studied it very closely to try to comprehend how someone could create something like that so quickly. The difference between Notch's LDJAM projects and other folks is that HE WROTE THE ENTIRE FUCKING ENGINE ALONG WITH THE GAME. Sprite transforms, pixel art, movement, sound... just everything... John Carmack eat your heart out.

Yes, I completely agree, I always fondly remember his game "drowning in problems"[1] because of the notable creativity behind it. Despite barely having an interface, it managed to entertain me until the end.

[1]http://game.notch.net/drowning/

Notch was a great hacker, but not a good coder. His code is hacks upon hack all the way down.

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