
Notch puts 0x10c on ice - kayoone
http://www.usgamer.net/articles/notch-puts-0x10c-on-icecommunity-heats-things-up-by-going-diy
======
rndmize
This doesn't surprise me at all. To be blunt, Notch's work has continually
been very... half-assed.

I first felt this when I played Minecraft; with successive patches and new
added elements, it always felt as if Notch had had an idea, and gone to
implement it, and then never bothered to flesh it out or work out the kinks.
The Nether and portal system was pretty sorry at release, with basically
nothing to do in the nether; rails and carts were always minimal given the
possibilities as well as having various non-obvious mechanics that were
somewhat frustrating; and so on. I feel you can really see this with the help
of the modding community, where often a poorly implemented idea like villages
or what not is decently fleshed out by someone who had a strong interest in
it.

After Notch stopped working on Minecraft, and even before, there was talk of
Scrolls, and the suit with Bethesda; after some time, that sorta fell by the
wayside, was eventually handed off to the rest of Mojang, and Notch went to
work on 0x10c. And now that, too, has been left in incomplete form.

I dunno whether its a matter of expectations, where the massive fan responses
he gets damages his creativity, or if he just loses interest in projects (I
have no lack of half-completed works laying around myself) but at this point
I'd rather hear about a new project when its close to completion or released,
rather than as he develops it.

~~~
marvin
Yep. Look no further than the top comment on Hacker News to find a dismissive
comment that explains exactly why the case in question is very half-assed.

You guys should really give Notch a break. He's a human like everyone else. It
must be incredibly hard to work under the pressure of 100,000 derisive hackers
that will use every opportunity to point out why he is inadequate. My reaction
on this story is rather to call him up and go have a beer and relax somewhere.
That's what you do when someone fails a project. You don't start pointing out
all his previous flaws and explaining why his effort was doomed in the first
place. That's antisocial. Can you imagine saying something like this to his
face? Can you imagine someone saying this to _your_ face?

~~~
vor_
I don't agree with your call for sympathy, because Notch is the one who
advertised Minecraft on 4chan and Reddit and sold early access to betas. He's
the one who advertised 0x10c as a followup.

His work ethic has been criticized in the past because features introduced in
one version of Minecraft would be abandoned by the next and remain incomplete.
Bugs would remain unfixed for long stretches of time. There wasn't a public
bug tracker (if there was any at all), so users had to list bugs themselves on
a fan wiki page.

To claim that criticm is "antisocial" and that we should instead treat him as
a best friend to have a beer with is an odd notion. Unless Notch is your
personal friend, he is just a programmer working at a company, and the only
relationship you have with him is as a customer. If you sell something, get
used to criticism.

~~~
InclinedPlane
He made a game, by himself, that was awesome and genre busting and fun to play
even when it was in the "alpha" stage. Millions of people played that version
of the game and millions of people loved it. Just because it wasn't perfect
doesn't diminish that achievement.

~~~
vor_
I don't see where in my post that I diminished its sales.

------
Centigonal
I think this happening wasn't wholly unexpected, and probably a good move for
Notch's mental health. 0x10c kind of arose out of the haze following
Minecraft's popularity explosion (For reference, it was announced on 3/31/12,
a month before the XBox 360 version of Minecraft came out). Since then, a lot
of things have happened to Persson and the people around him, both personal
and relating to games, and he's had some time to acclimate. If he's like most
people, Notch's head would be in a fundamentally different place now than it
was at the time 0x10c's core ideas were fleshed out, and it's really hard to
improve and expand a game you're working on alone when so much has happened.

The community's response is really interesting! Judging by what the article
said ("The community will not use Persson's code, story or even the game's
title"), the only thing they're really keeping is the game's environment and
its core ideas (which are really cool! You have a space ship with a user-
programmable computer, and a big open world, EVE-style!). I wonder how much of
what is said about the project's organization is spin, though, because
"several departments" sounds uncharacteristic of that community (or any
smaller open source project, really), especially given the loose, idividual-
oriented nature of other notch-related projects (things like the Catacomb
Snatch remake[1] and the very splintered Minecraft modding community)

[1][http://catacombsnatch.net/](http://catacombsnatch.net/)

~~~
shardling
Minecraft was making obscene amounts of money well before the xbox release.
(Something like 100k a day in 2010, according to a quick google.)

------
Deestan
Having watched the discussion around 0x10^c for the past year, it's hilarious
to see all the comments (reddit, twitter, etc) where people seem to think it
would help if Mojang just hired a large team to "pick up the pace". Notch was
struggling to make the creative vision coherent - throwing manpower on the
problem to "just start implementing it" would just have locked down the
incoherencies and made the project unsalvageable.

Given how seemingly intolerable the pressure on this game has been, it makes
sense to just drop it. Maybe once the thing cools down and no-one is watching,
he'll become motivated to work on it in quiet.

Which leads naturally to some wild speculation: If _I_ were Notch, and just
got some renewed motivation to develop the game, I would have just told
everyone "I have stopped - project's dead" so I could work on it in peace.

~~~
scotty79
By hiring large team they might have accidentally hire someone who would pick
up the vision and carry it further. Who knows, maybe Notch would join back in
if he saw someone expanding on his idea and making things happen.

I think I abandoned a lot of projects because no one shared my passion for
them to the point of actually owning and developing parts of them. If no one
cares enough about the idea to work on it then maybe I also shouldn't.

~~~
shrikant
_By hiring large team they might have accidentally hire someone who would pick
up the vision and carry it further._

Please don't use this hiring advice.

~~~
scotty79
Heh. It wasn't intended as such. Just an observation what might happen if you
have too much money, not enough ideas about what to focus on and you start
hiring awesome people.

------
M4v3R
This makes me sad, because I was really excited for that game. I even wrote a
small QuickBASIC to DCPU-Assembly compiler with Go [1] for it, which was a
nice Go learning project for me.

I hope that someone will pick up this great idea and build a similar game,
where programming is a first citizen and you can do crazy stuff that was
planned for 0x10c like programming your own spaceship, sharing code with
others on floppy discs, and so on.

[1] [https://github.com/M4v3R/DCPU-Bas](https://github.com/M4v3R/DCPU-Bas)

~~~
VMG
I think the DCPU16-stuff can be reused in other games

------
baby
> was put on hold indefinitely last week

This article is entirely false. The game has been put on holds for a year or
so. More than 6 months ago people already knew that Notch gave up. No news
here.

edit :

also if anyone is interested in the genre, it has been posted many times on
/r/0x10c : check the game "Starmade". It's almost what Notch wanted to do,
without the computer part.

~~~
csense
> More than 6 months ago people already knew that Notch gave up.

I don't know about "people," but I certainly didn't know it. I was just
checking the website [http://0x10c.com](http://0x10c.com) as recently as a few
weeks ago.

~~~
baby
I'm talking about /r/0x10c

------
embwbam
I left my startup last year. I didn't sell it, but had saved enough money to
last me 3-5 years. It's enough to make me feel free to work on whatever is
important to me.

One of the unintuitive things I have struggled with is that now that I can do
anything, I have a hard time choosing to invest time in something unless it
feels like "the one" project. It has to be so important it was worth saving so
hard and leaving my startup. So the bar is much higher for what I spend my
time on. I realize this feeling is stupid, but it doesn't stop me from having
it.

I bet being wealthy and having a huge hit feels similar. Notch probably feels
MORE like giving up on any given project because he second guesses himself.
Since he can work on anything, it HAS to be amazing, or why else would he
choose it when he can choose anything?

~~~
Cthulhu_
> One of the unintuitive things I have struggled with is that now that I can
> do anything, I have a hard time choosing to invest time in something

Thing is, when one can choose between a lot of things, all of which seem
awesome, one tends to be unable to choose (or choose all of the things and do
everything half-assed or not finish anything). Human trait.

------
csense
The community-based clone's website is
[http://trillek.org](http://trillek.org)

Really, it should have been linked in the article...

~~~
jared314
After skimming the forums, I am slightly worried. They are establishing the
management tree and throwing endless ideas at a wall. I hope they actually
release something, because I like the concept. But, they are also starting
from, almost, scratch.

[https://github.com/trillek-team](https://github.com/trillek-team)

~~~
jdpage
I would say that establishing a management tree makes semi-sense, since they
seem to have a bunch more people working on it from the get-go that you'd
usually have. In that case, I can see why they'd want to arrange who's working
on what.

------
Tloewald
There's something I call manic-depressive programmer syndrome. It used to
occur infrequently, but -- I think -- because tools have gotten so much better
(everything from the quality and speed of compilers and class libraries to the
speed of hardware) it's becoming more common. We get a fantastic 1.0 product
that never gets followed up. At best you see bug fixes and updates, but the
extraordinarily promising core never gets expanded.

I'll cite some examples:

* TextMate

* Silo 3D

* The Hit List

* Hypercard

Each of these is characterized by being developed by a very small team
(sometimes one person), being extraordinarily impressive out of the starting
gate, and never developing to its full potential.

~~~
pekk
I heartily disagree that it used to occur infrequently. It has occurred as
long as people have been programming.

~~~
Tloewald
You're probably right, but I don't have examples to hand.

------
lsiebert
Meh, I feel like I got more than my money's worth from minecraft. Notch
doesn't owe anyone 0x10c. AFAIK, no pre-payments were made.

------
bane
Lots of comments here about the stick-to-it-iveness of Notch. I bet it was
shaping up to just not be terribly fun.

Sometimes that happens with a game and no amount of tweaking the mechanics can
push it over that hump, the foundational idea was just flawed.

------
marknutter
He didn't think the game was fun so he stopped developing it. This sounds like
something a lot of game development companies out there could learn from.

~~~
pekk
I wonder if the obsessive focus fans developed on writing ASM, to the
exclusion of almost any game mechanics, might have something to do with that

------
jbrooksuk
This was kind of expected IMHO. Notch has had a helluva lot of stuff happening
in his life.

It was fun whilst it lasted though. Check out my DCPU13 in PHP
[https://github.com/jbrooksuk/DCPU16](https://github.com/jbrooksuk/DCPU16)

------
sspiff
I've been following the development of Rodina[1], which is a similar game
except that it uses Lua instead of a DCPU, and has made decent progress in the
past year. It will also follow a release early, release often way of working,
with the first release by the end of this year. I'm far more excited about
Rodina that I ever was about 0x10c.

[1] [http://elliptic-games.com/](http://elliptic-games.com/)

------
Associat0r
I'm personally more excited about Elite: Dangerous.
[http://elite.frontier.co.uk](http://elite.frontier.co.uk) by David Braben
(from Raspberry Pi)

It will have a scientifically based galaxy with rotating an orbiting planets
which I think is very important in a space game like this, it also features a
mass multi-player dynamic galaxy.

It's shaping up nicely as you can see from the newsletters
[http://us2.campaign-
archive2.com/home/?u=dcbf6b86b4b0c7d1c21...](http://us2.campaign-
archive2.com/home/?u=dcbf6b86b4b0c7d1c21b73b1e&id=eb767c006f)

and youtube channel
[http://www.youtube.com/user/FrontierDevelopments/videos](http://www.youtube.com/user/FrontierDevelopments/videos)

~~~
opless
You mean Elite 4, the game he's been promising to deliver for over a decade?
:)

That's E:D sorted ... I hear that the Star Citizen fanboys are quite rabbid
and sure to turn up shortly. Brace for impact!

 _looks nervous_

~~~
Associat0r
They had a successful kickstarter campaign
[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-
dangero...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1461411552/elite-dangerous)

It also has a solid release date set for March 2014 and they are right on
schedule, alpha testing will start this December.

It's not as if he can now run away with the money and postpone it for another
decade.

~~~
opless
No, but he's bit off more than he can chew I think.

Also, Star Citizen - using CryEngine and non procedural systems. _snigger_

This, gentlemen is why there are no good space games out there.

------
erikb
+1 for the great choide of title. The article is actually about the community
taking over development, which is not really proven 1 week after starting the
idea. It's not like cataclysm (a zombie rogue-like) where the developer built
a running program and a community around that peace of software and now they
finished a Kickstarter and developed the program some recognizable steps
ahead. After a week of forming a new team it's not even clear if the team
itself will hold up.

------
neuro
He created a masterpiece for today's younger generation - what the c64, 2e and
trs80 did for others. An engine for building creative thinkers in today's
locked down digital architectures.

It's the experiencing exploring that's important not the artifact. That's not
on ice.

------
rocky1138
Saw this one coming. The question is: what is he working on, then?

~~~
clone1018
Business development, management and relaxing.

~~~
jdpage
Or Ludum Dare this Friday...

------
cLeEOGPw
People lose interest in their projects all the time, the only difference here
is the hype that surrounded this one.

------
pearjuice
Am I the only one who reads it as "Zero Existence"?

------
antirez
Hint: before complaining do what Notch accomplished with Minecraft.

That said, I'm sorry too about the news because I was really excited about the
0x10c plot / idea.

------
catmanjan
Anyone else completely forget about 0x10c? I thought it was cool, but it's
been so long that I'm not even bothered.

