By Craig Pearson on February 17th, 2012 at 11:10 am.
Minecraft creator’s Mojang are building a game right in front of your eyes, all for charity. The team have started Mojam, a weekend of sleepless game development to aid the Humble Bundle. The type of game they’re building was put to vote, and looks like it’ll be an Egyptian Steampunk Dungeon Crawler RTS Shoot ‘Em Up. If they make a million dollars, Notch will shave his beard. We have the stream for you below.
And don’t forget to give generously. I HATE his beard.
17/02/2012 at 11:12 nootpingu86 says:
He should wax his entire body and paint himself gold.
17/02/2012 at 11:20 bglamb says:
I feel a little bit sick…..
17/02/2012 at 12:03 Milky1985 says:
[EDIT] Reply fail
17/02/2012 at 12:03 nootpingu86 says:
http://youtu.be/XMjYY3tbX1k
Aw c’mon. You know he could pull this off.
17/02/2012 at 15:58 Sarlix says:
That would be amazing. It would be like that old skool kung fu flick Return of the Eighteen Bronzemen. Minus the muscles.
edit: RPS would be more fun if you could embed images :(
http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/7830/18bronzemendvdcover.jpg
17/02/2012 at 11:20 Craig Pearson says:
FYI: the feed has been a bit up and down all morning. Creepers in the system .
17/02/2012 at 11:20 mr.ioes says:
2 mistakes: It isn’t live now and the polls suggest it will be a real time strategy steampunk game. RPS, why you lie to me?
Anyway, his beard must go.
17/02/2012 at 11:21 Teddy Leach says:
Not just that – an RTS Shoot ‘em Up. Somehow.
17/02/2012 at 11:26 griffin_jt says:
I’m glad that it will have RTS elements. There’s a lot of space to do something new and interesting, some kind of gimmick you’d never dare to do for a full game.
Also, beards have rights too. The man in the Crusader Kings II advert would look a lot less creepy with a beard. In fact, beards for all!
17/02/2012 at 11:29 Teddy Leach says:
I’d have honestly preferred a Steampunk dungeon crawler. You don’t see too many of those.
17/02/2012 at 11:35 Craig Pearson says:
It WAS live when I wrote the thing. Gremlins.
17/02/2012 at 11:39 Apples says:
By shoot ‘em do they mean shmup, or a shooter (as in FPS/TPS)? If the former then how are they plausibly going to combine probably the slowest type of game with the fastest type of game? I can see it working with a shooter though.
17/02/2012 at 11:42 Teddy Leach says:
Probably a system where you can control a unit. That’s the only way I can see it working.
17/02/2012 at 12:07 Milky1985 says:
Probably cannon fodder style control and shooting, you control one guy who can run around build stuff (any training buildings build automatically based on resource points or something) .
Can do basicaly things like leave units in one area but only directly control your group.
Think that could just about work.
17/02/2012 at 11:23 Jekev says:
Unless I am mistaken the poll indicates that it will be an Shoot-em-up-RTS with an Egyptian-Steampunk theme? Or does RPS have some top secret information that says otherwise?
EDIT: Damn, ninja’d.
17/02/2012 at 11:25 Craig Pearson says:
Teehee.
17/02/2012 at 11:23 hemmer says:
I distinctly remember him saying that his co-worker will shave his beard….with his FISTS!
Which is only more incentive to throw money at charity.
17/02/2012 at 14:22 Lord Custard Smingleigh says:
How much is that, per beard-hair?
17/02/2012 at 11:27 caddyB says:
Distracted by the manboobs.
17/02/2012 at 11:28 MuscleHorse says:
Game development is every bit as exciting as I suspected it would be.
17/02/2012 at 13:00 Germanunkol says:
Seconded. Now I know what I look like when I code… *snore*
17/02/2012 at 11:42 Squire says:
Really though, what is the point of filming the development process of anything live, most people act completely different when they are being filmed so you’d need to film for at least a week to start getting good relaxed results. But cos its live its super awkward haha
Also I love that they still have terrible WiFi even though they live in a country with 100mbit cable and he’s a millionaire.
17/02/2012 at 12:06 Valvarexart says:
Feels good being Swedish, understanding all their secret conversations :)
17/02/2012 at 12:23 DrScuttles says:
Is it a problem with beards in general, or just Notch’s?
17/02/2012 at 13:11 Craig Pearson says:
I have a beard. It’s mighty, but it despises competition.
17/02/2012 at 14:59 DrScuttles says:
Ah, I only ask because I too have a beard. Not a competitive beard like Notch, but a quietly confident beard.
17/02/2012 at 15:52 tungstenHead says:
You should fight him over it, Craig. Beard against beard, no holds barred. Full contact beard wrestling. Definitely film it.
17/02/2012 at 18:29 Droopy The Dog says:
I think you’ve just stumbled on a marvelous euphemism for man-kissing there.
[Edit] And then asked him to film it, you dirty dog…
17/02/2012 at 12:25 Juan Carlo says:
Notch needs to keep his beard. It’s the only thing keeping him from looking like “Divine” when he wasn’t in drag.
17/02/2012 at 12:31 jackass00 says:
No wonder they take so long to make anything. They are all talking and only Notch i doing anything.
17/02/2012 at 13:11 TJ says:
Damn, missed the talking, tuned in in time to watch endless lines of code being written. Fascinating.
17/02/2012 at 13:12 Craig Pearson says:
Game development sausage.
17/02/2012 at 13:17 nootpingu86 says:
*slurpy sucky sounds*
17/02/2012 at 13:29 Gap Gen says:
Is there a compilation of the bits that aren’t just them typing? I missed most of the design meeting, which was a shame.
17/02/2012 at 13:44 Davee says:
This is actually quite interesting to watch – a full-time insider view of the development. And as a bonus: no matter what language they use I’ll understand! ;)
17/02/2012 at 13:45 frenz0rz says:
I love how 10,000 people voted for Peter Molyneux as a viable game genre.
17/02/2012 at 13:56 Koozer says:
*raises hand*
17/02/2012 at 14:06 Gap Gen says:
Peter MolyDeux game jam! Must be done.
17/02/2012 at 14:23 CaLe says:
Did Notch beat you up and take your lunch money? Bless.
17/02/2012 at 14:46 nootpingu86 says:
Notch beat up my expectations and took my paypal payment of $13. A brazen crime the likes of which will go unmatched in the annals of gaming’s great consumer outrages.
But really. A little less slurpy-sucky on ol’ Notch. Or maybe RPS Mineblog? I mean you guys started getting apologetic with the STALKER mod news stuff, and that’s actually a good game.
I have a notion: someone write a filter for the content blocker on firefox for minecraft.
17/02/2012 at 14:58 bikkebakke says:
Switch in to watch the stream, see notch playing with a toy-gun.
I detect coding at high levels here!
17/02/2012 at 15:33 Llewyn says:
Stop objectifying the man – there’s more to him than his breasts, you know. Ultimately you’re only degrading yourself.
17/02/2012 at 15:41 trjp says:
There’s definately some tool detection going on in what you wrote…
17/02/2012 at 15:48 RogB says:
he’s clearly new here. Did anyone give him the guided tour and friendly chat about manners?
17/02/2012 at 15:54 Tei says:
Is that netbeans or eclipse?
I use to write code with eclipse, but is so a shitty codebase. It has a lot of memory leaks or something like that, so wen is out of memory, trivial actions like Copy & Paste break. Is a lol wen you can’t even open “Search”.
With netbeans you don’t have the 100% of functions, but you rarelly need these that don’t exist. Netbeans is a more stable Eclipse.
My favorite text editor is SciTE. Is what I use for quick scripts because you press F5, and are interpreted on the fly and the result is show on the same window. SciTE is one of the few text editors that allow proportional fonts in code, so you can have your comments with a proportional font, and the rest of the code with a monospace font.
17/02/2012 at 16:51 trjp says:
It’s Eclipse – I can tell by the fact he’s created a new workspace and not
closed the bloody annoying Task and Mylyn tabs :)
I’ve used Eclipse for Android stuff for a year and aside from ADT’s obsession with recompiling and rebuilding far, far too often – it’s worked AOK for me (even on a laptop it’s usable).
AFAIK Notch uses LWJGL for his coding exploits??
17/02/2012 at 16:50 trjp says:
He’s insulting people based on what the back of their PC looks like – I think we should just have him shot and buried on the moors – just to be sure…
17/02/2012 at 16:54 mod the world says:
So i have the livestream open in a window for some time and all i see is people having fun and shooting at each other with USB-powered canons.That’s how work looks like for game devs?
19/02/2012 at 08:05 kavika says:
That’s what it looks like for many non-game devs too. Tech companies are often full of ner(d)f battle.
When I was watching I saw someone stick a foam creeper in front of the camera a bunch.
When he was done and got out from in front of the screen, I saw some dred-haired+bespectacled guy leaning way back in his chair, messing around on a laptop connected to a monitor, making funny noises at the screen while alternately play testing and coding.
I also saw someone hitting buttons on a random sound generator program on the workstation behind (to the left of) the coder guy. At some point he stopped hitting the “random” button and seemed to be tweaking it. I sounded like they were trying to make an item pickup sound effect. The tool they were using looked brown-ish. It might have been sfxr.
They also talked to each other a bit. Sometimes in whatever language they speak, and sometimes in accented English.
17/02/2012 at 17:35 Jahnz says:
The game sounds awesome except for the RTS bit. I guess it depends on what form the RTS stuff takes, but my wife and I are buying a couple copies tonight in any case. I just have never really gotten the hang of RTSes. Too many things going on at once.
It would be neat if you controlled one character with a WASD and mouse top down shooter style while being able to build and repair structures that would help you fight or something. A base or town you can return to or defend. Sort of a dungeon crawl mixed with tower defense. If you had a huge world where you could explore and you could also improve your base camp that would be awesome. Sort of build the central town up with your exploration riches. Hmmm…
17/02/2012 at 18:07 Saiko Kila says:
I won’t pay to Notch (but I also don’t pay taxes, so I’m a sneaky bastard). However, If I did pay, I’d like to see someone else shaving his beard, preferably with an axe. Observing a guy shaving his own beard has no entertaining value to me.
17/02/2012 at 18:56 Martel says:
I’m just happy to see it’s like my job….one guy doing all the work and the rest dicking around in the background.
20/02/2012 at 13:25 adonf says:
So the bundle is not available for sale now that the 60 hour jam is over. I wish this would have been made clearer from the start.