Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Initially reports suggested the turf war between Minecraft-makers the Mojangs and Skyrim-makers the Bethesdas over the former’s forthcoming online card game Scrolls had been settled broadly reasonably. However, Bethesda’s own statement on the matter yesterday revealed that it isn’t as simple as Mojang getting to make Scrolls unhindered and Bethesda ending up with the trademark for a common English word.

Here’s a new kicker: “The terms of the settlement bar Mojang from using the Scrolls mark for any sequel to the current card game, or any other video game.”
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Because we, as a species, have allowed our reality to become so ridiculous that people can own the rights to a noun, there has been an ongoing battle between Bethesda and Mojang over the right to use the word “Scrolls” in a game name. Bethesda’s very long running The Elder Scrolls first-person RPG is utterly indistinguishable from Mojang’s card-collecting Scrolls. Wait, is it the other way around? I’m so confused! But the good news is, their lawyers have finished spending each other’s money and there’s an agreement!

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Minecraft 1.2 is here, bringing with it an assortment of features that made me go ‘awwww’, in that way that people do when they see an adorable baby animal playing with another baby animal of a different species. There’s a good reason for me to mention baby animals because, to my mind, the most important additions in this version are puppies, which tame wolves will occasionally receive from the ciconia lupus. Villagers will also create children occasionally. Ocelots and cats have also been added, along with a jungle biome, iron golems and a doubling of the maximum map height. Downward lie all the details and a trailer by the Hat Films chaps.

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We’ve just had a note passed to us, under the door, that says Minecraft developers Mojang are about to announce the four main bods behind Bukkit have “joined ranks” with the company. Bukkit would be the Minecraft server mod that made running Minecraft servers so much easier, and enormously improves mod support on the server side. The plan is to have the same flexibility on the official Minecraft server. I barely understand what I’ve written, but this works better:

John: So will this mean that Minecraft will finally properly support modding?
Carl Manneh: Yes!

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It’s a very sleepy Monday morning here in the strange, forever hungry country of Newsland today, but fortunately Markus ‘Notch’ Persson has elected to show off an experimental TF2 RTS demake he’s been playing around with making for his own edification, currently under the placeholder (and certainly not final) name of HERP DERP HERP FORTRESS. He’s been live-streaming his development/noodling over here and it’s going on right now. You can watch it below, or with the excited chatter of onlookers here. He’s shared the above image too, which you can peer at and dissect for hints by clicking on it for the full version. The bad news is that he says this game ‘may never be released’ – which means your job is, of course, to go nag him.

The good news is that he’s presumably too busy developing the game to read this post, so I could say anything about him here and he’ll never know. Did you know that he’s afraid of cheese?
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Poor Catacomb Snatch, forever destined to be a quirk of game development: the game Mojang made in a weekend and then tossed out into the world, unready, uneducated, unubered. All it needed was a little polish to make it all better, some tender loving uber. But what if it could happen? What if someone took the source code, appended the game with with “Uber” and carried on developing? That would make an Uber Catacomb Snatch. And if such a thing were to happen, they might as well set up a website saying so. It would look a bit like this , and host downloads of the game for everyone to play. And you know, if it did happen, if the impossible became possible, then I might see fit to include a video of it below this here line. Dare you step over it and into the World of the Impossible?

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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.
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Oh, I do like the cuddly side of this industry. Mojang, one of the cuddliest developers, is spending this weekend making a game. They’re doing it in conjunction with the ultra-huggable Humble Bundle peeps, meaning that the game they create will be available to those who donate money to charity. At the moment no one seems to know or think it relevant to explain which charity, and I’m trying to find out. Hopefully it’s Child’s Play or the like, and not Cream Teas For Paedophiles.

And they’re going to broadcast the whole process as they do it, for 60 hours. You can see the details in the video below.

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We don’t usually allow RPS headlines to run onto a second line, but this is a very special case indeed. During idle Twitter discussions about the whys and wherefores of a possible Mojang-funded Psychonauts sequel, I heard that the first game had cost $15 million to develop and that Tim Schafer was estimating a $20m cost for a sequel.

Clearly, these eyewatering figures cast some doubt on Mojang being able to successfully (or at least wholly) fund the game. So much so that VG247 editor, friend of RPS and entertainingly relentless cynic Pat Garratt has pledged to me – and now to the public – that he will eat his own trousers, on camera, in the event that a Mojang-funded Psychonauts 2 comes to pass.
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With Tim Schafer and Markus Persson now in talks over the possibility of a Psychonauts 2, it gets us to wondering what other games we’d like to see Notch’s millions spent making happen. Notch reports that he and Tim will likely meet at next month’s GDC, but also stresses that people shouldn’t yet get their hopes up. Too late! But were it not to happen, to which game should those spare riches be directed? We’ve made Notch’s mind up for him.

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We mentioned earlier that Tim Schafer would love to make a Pyschonauts 2, but can’t get the funding. Well, Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson spotted our story and suggested to Schafer that they should work together to make it happen. Multimillionaire Persson clearly has the funds to do this, and everyone in the world with their brain in the right place wants to see a sequel to one of the most joyful games of all time, so this is a thing that might actually happen.

Clearly at the moment this is a tweeted offer, not a signed contract, but it’s a massively exciting one. Tim, say yes!