Minecraft – Page 5 – Fearless Gamer

mc_cathedral

The Minecraft community has been growing a bit restless over the past month or two, much like the League of Legends community, in the face of slow development. Notch, the game’s creator and primary developer, has been on vacation for a couple weeks. He’s back in the office, as he posted to his Tumblr today, and ready to crank out some new features.

Here’s what he said:

During the two weeks up until GDC, we’ll be working on finishing up the new game launcher and finishing up some new game features for the game, including an official white list implementation for the server and more types of half sized blocks.

Personally, I’m excited about the changes. I host a small private server for a couple friends and none of us know our way around Linux particularly well. I also don’t really have the time right now to mess around with mods and all that, so the more features built into the basic server package, the better. The half block thing is also good news. I’ve been working on the cathedral type structure you see pictured above over the course of a week and a half and it’s the first time I’ve really done much with the half block pavers. They definitely open up some nice design features for structures.

I’ve been hesitating to write about Minecraft for about a week now because I wanted this article to go live on our main site first. I first heard about Minecraft probably six months ago or so. In fact, I think I remember taking a peek at it last April, but that could be wrong. At any rate, I didn’t get too involved with it. I was deep into League of Legends at that point, so there really wasn’t time in my gaming schedule.

Fast forward to today, when my LoL schedule has become fairly casual. Now I understand the appeal of the open world. It’s an incredible game, despite the primitive graphics and the fact that the game is still in beta. If you’ve played it, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, well, you need to.

I won’t say much more than that for now, mostly because I’ve written an article for our parent site about the importance of Minecraft’s design. Here’s a quick excerpt:

For all of the fun and magic that makes “Minecraft” great, the thing that makes “Minecraft” important is its design. The game’s original developer, a guy named Markus Persson that the “Minecraft” community knows as Notch, did something a lot of AAA developers would laugh at. Instead of trying to immerse the player in a world by using narrative, he chose to focus on gameplay. By simplifying the controls, the world, even the graphics, Persson created a game world that players can call their own, a world they want to shape and be a part of in ways that other games don’t allow. My own first experience with “Minecraft” was so overwhelming I actually sat and giggled as I played. There is so much potential – truly unbounded creative potential – that I was immediately transported back to childhood, sitting in front of an upturned bucket of Legos, wondering what I should build next.

You can check out the full article on Bullz-Eye.com.

Category: Minecraft (Page 5 of 5)

Notch back from vacation, Minecraft update coming soon

Why Minecraft matters to gamers

FOLLOW US!

CATEGORIES