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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

by rndmize 13y ago

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.

citricsquid 13y ago
Markus was never involved in Scrolls development. Markus had been good friends with Jahkob (Mojang co-founder) for many years prior to Minecraft, Jahkob had been playing with an idea for a long time that Markus liked (what has eventually become Scrolls) and Mojang was formed, in part, to back Scrolls. Markus was never going to develop Scrolls; it was Jahkob's project and he formed a team to build it. Scrolls has become a full game that is being constantly developed, you can buy it now: http://scrolls.com http://scrolls.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrolls_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrolls_(video_game)
- pfisch 13y ago
  I don't know that I would call scrolls a full game. It has about as many cards as like 25-30% of a single magic set.
  - vorce 13y ago
    I'd say it's definitely a full game. So many hours of fun and tinkering even with the relatively low scroll count so far. And it's just going to get better, still Beta. I very much recommend trying out Scrolls if you're into deep strategy games.
    - justjimmy 13y ago
      I'm surprised you think Scrolls is a deep strategy game. I've only sunk no more than 10 hours and I already see everyone with the same decks (3 factions, 3 decks). Not much room for different strategy since there are hardly any cards. Scroll's complexity isn't 'complex' - it's needlessly cumbersome and tiring - having to do consistent mathematics in your head isn't fun (for me anyway). Hearthstone is way more complex simply due to the 9 (vs 3) classes.
      - vorce 13y ago
        I have played it for around 2 months and still find new things to play, test and learn. The hex grid not only makes the game unique for a TCG, but also enables a lot of tough strategical decisions. 3 factions yes, a fourth on the way. 3 decks? No way! Decks evolve constantly and new ones pop up, some die out - seems very healthy for such a small, young game so far :) Just my 2 cents and experience.
  - SimHacker 13y ago
    Quantity does not necessarily imply quality. In fact, some times, and especially with games, just the opposite. The world doesn't need any more POGs or Beanie Babies.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    That's the same thing I say about poker. Not nearly as complex as Apples to Apples.
asiekierka 13y ago
Indeed, the mods for Minecraft are great. The only problem is nobody made a mod to REMOVE things. I'd remove the End any time - it's just a pointless place that a very few very specific things use. Disclosure: I also run a modded Minecraft server (with an easy-to-use launcher and many nifty features), if anyone cares.
- lsiebert 13y ago
  Is it survival? I have yet to find a nice survival server.
  - zalzane 13y ago
    I recommend 2b2t.org, as it is probably the best survival server out there. It's a pvp-enabled anarchy server. Nobody can get banned for any reason whatsoever. The server is ~3 years old and the map has never been reset. What this means is that from spawn to about 5km away from spawn is desolate wasteland. You have to travel at least 10-20km out before you find areas that havent been burned down or still have regular trees. At about 30km from spawn, the chances of your base being discovered drop pretty fast, but most people keep their full blown bases at 100+km out, with advance bases 20ish km from spawn that they use as temp bases for raiding people near spawn. There's pretty much two things you do on 2b2t after establishing a base - exploring to find other peoples bases, and raiding them. There's hundreds of bases that are plenty old, many of which still have loot in them, with new bases being created by new people every day. Here's a handful of pics I took of the spawn, some bases, and a few megaprojects I found: http://imgur.com/a/sGoRc#0 http://imgur.com/a/sGoRc#0 If you want minecraft 'survival' mode, you'll get it on this server. </endshill>
    - AndyKelley 13y ago
      This sounds like my kind of server. I love this idea - see what happens when no rules of any kind are set up. A kind of "hands off" deist approach.
  - trafficlight 13y ago
    With PvP or without?
ordinary 13y ago
I think the fundamental principles behind release early, release often are sound. I doubt Minecraft would've been as big a success if it'd been released as a fait accompli. The continuous addition of new content is certainly what kept me coming back. In fact, the main reason I stopped playing was that my RSS feed stopped working, which made it seem like they'd halted development. That said, I can imagine that Minecraft has set dauntingly high expectations for him. He wouldn't be the first to suffer under that pressure. Albert Einstein famously said that his years at the patent office were the happiest of his life, because no one expected him to lay golden eggs.
- skore 13y ago
  > That said, I can imagine that Minecraft has set dauntingly high expectations for him. High expectations coupled with basically unlimited funding really is a problem. I see Notch as a highly creative (if unstructured) programmer and people like that usually do their best work when facing constraints.
- tetha 13y ago
  "Release early and release often" is not connected to "(iteratively) fleshing features out", though. I'm currently learning this, and while feeling weird, it's a very powerful way to release features very early, check back with users and then extend from there. This happens in some areas of minecraft, but on the other hand, there's vast areas where it doesn't happen and people aren't happy about it.
nness 13y ago
Unrelated, but on the matter of Minecraft mods; I really wish we had a nice modding API that didn't involve haphazardly de-compiling the Java byte-code to make changes.
- workbench 13y ago
  Yet another feature promised time and time again from notch but eventually ignored and forgotten because it required more than an afternoon of work.
- nemof 13y ago
  that STILL hasn't been introduced? I thought that had been promised literally years ago.
  - anton_gogolev 13y ago
    John Siracusa had a epic rant on that exact topic on ATP #25 ( http://atp.fm/ http://atp.fm/ ). I myself was baffled to find out that modding involves unpacking a JAR file, overwriting .class files with modded ones and packing the whole thing back up. Disaster.
    - petemc_ 13y ago
      Why is this a disaster? My 10 year old son has been doing this for years without any problems. It has encouraged him to start poking around other game parts and learning lots in the process. Edit: There are also many easy to use front ends for adding mods and working with different minecraft versions etc.
      - smackfu 13y ago
        * Because you can only run one patch at a time. * Because your patches only work against one version of the game. * Because you are directly updating files, so both of the previous restrictions can easily be violated, which tends to cause a crash on startup. The front-ends work around this lunacy by keeping multiple clean copies of the entire install, at multiple version levels, so that each mod can trash it on its own or use the version it needs.
6ren 13y ago
1. if Notch had your perfectionistic attitude, he wouldn't have released anything - so, no minecraft. Also, Elon Musk wouldn't have had three rocket disasters - no SpaceX. And Mark Zuckerberg certainly wouldn't have began The Facebook. Similar for google, linux, Windows (especially!) Of course, all these guys were lucky... but isn't it striking how fortune favours the brave? 2. Given that Notch had all this incredible success even though he's so "half-assed", imagine what you could do if you adopted his approach? (For the record, I thought 0x10c was a stupid idea. OTOH I really liked the idea of the minecraft world - where the cube basis is universal and malleable, and sacrificing nicer graphics for that - though the actual game doesn't grab me. I think Notch is awesome and inspirational, and should keep doing what he values - regardless of my opinions!)
- GoNB 13y ago
  Nobody on HN seems to want to address it, so I will. It's pretty obvious: Notch is incredibly wealthy and no longer is interested in programming. Can you blame the guy? Most of us would probably stop programming if we had his never ending flow of income. Minecraft is like milk: It's always selling and he hardly has to think about working anymore. Mojang doesn't even have to update Minecraft, the community drives it. The mobile version has reigned the iOS store for months. It's the holy grail of perpetual passive income we all wish we had that Notch has obtained.
  - zanny 13y ago
    If I had enough money not to care anymore, I'd still write code because I feel it achieves something worthwhile. I've contributed a bunch to KDE in the past, I would just work on it "full time" (aka, whenever I wanted to).
  - workbench 13y ago
    He is interested in programming though, he does several Lundem Dares a year. He's just never been interested in seeing projects through to the end (unless it can be finished in an afternoon). He's never actually completed a project. Minecraft is half finished and filled with little steps in every directions never quite doing any step properly.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
marvin 13y ago
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?
- marshray 13y ago
  "Ever since superstar success your work has been half assed" Where does one find such friends?
- hobs 13y ago
  While I think the overly negative comments are overblown, the source (imo) is that there is definitely a group of people that think Notch is the best thing since sliced bread, and the truth is that he had a somewhat meritorious technical accomplishment that went onto be a commercial success, and they cant stand it.
- workbench 13y ago
  Don't work publicly on it then, problem solved. Think he enjoys the part of the project where he gets fans excited and talks about huge ideas more than actually working on and finishing a job.
- asdasf 13y ago
  >Can you imagine someone saying this to your face? Yes. And since I am fully aware of my tendency to lose interest in projects part way through and move on to something else, I don't publicize them while they are in the "hey this idea sounds cool" stage. Thus avoiding having people point out the objective reality that I don't finish much of what I start.
- vor_ 13y ago
kayoone 13y ago
I think the approach taken by Notch is more like playing around with an idea to see if it works. The fact that he now runs a multi million dollar business doesnt seem to have changed this and its probably a good thing. We all have unfinished/failed projects laying around somewhere..he has is just way more popular than most of us and has chosen to make his development efforts somewhat public, which might have been a mistake as he now realizes. IMO, hes still building games with the right attitude. He plays around and tries to find a cool idea, just as he has done before.
magicalist 13y ago
Look at massive games like Skyrim or GTA that have multiple gameplay systems in their vast amount of content that are only sketches and not at all fulfilling the potential they suggest. Then remember that dozens to hundreds of people work on those games. Then repeat the phrase "I dunno whether its a matter of expectations" and think carefully about how that phrase applies to you. Of course hundreds of modders are going to end up fleshing out what one guy (and then a handful of guys) could not. The nether system being "pretty sorry" at release is almost a parody of a statement. If it's not meant to be, I guess the implication is that he should have released it only after "finishing" it? Or not added features at all, instead focusing on more core features? Those approaches have a massive hidden assumption that alternate-universe-Notch would have taken those paths and then focussed on features you wanted, rather than spending months, on, say, making a higher height limit, or better biome distribution, or better cow grazing behavior, etc etc all of which would not have added substantially to the fun of playing the game. Minecraft was and is an incredibly fun game. I'm not suggesting you should kiss the feet of every stray thought Notch has, but I find the people that write these kinds of posts have lost any sort of perspective. Think of the number of elaborate and most of all actually fun games written by one person that have not only shipped to players, but also were fun to play at every stage of an open development process. The number is tiny, and the reason is that it's really really hard. Maybe people don't have game making experience? Making games is hard, making a fun game is much much harder, and making a fun game out of a bunch of different interlocking systems that is relatively bug free is basically a miracle if we look at an existing games to attempted games ratio. Now, whether or not Notch owes you updates to the Nether for life for your $15 for Minecraft is a whole other story, but Minecraft has been fun to play in every incarnation I've played since Alpha. Calling his work half-assed is bullshit, even if we only compare his output to the actual output of every other aspiring video game maker that has ever existed. I'd say he's in some pretty good company on the far end of the curve on that one.
- criley2 13y ago
  I call his work bullshit after seeing how smoothly Minecraft development was under Jeb, and seeing how mod developers work. It wasn't until a talented and motivated developer took over the project that quality improved, IMO. And mod developers are out there writing far more fleshed out, balanced and reliable code despite the fact that they still do not have access to the unobfuscated source. Minecraft is still released without an API, or any mod tools, and no source. When I look at the brilliant and dedicated work of those who reverse engineer the binary for every major release, building third party mod api's like Bukkit and Forge, and allowing for ever-more-smooth updates of a spaghetti of dozens of disparate mods... it's hard not to look down on Notch's work. I mean hell, the teams reverse-engineering and supporting so many mods are unpaid, and small. They've gotten better, faster, and are more dedicated. In the past year we've seen unified liquid API under Forge allowing for mods like IC2, Buildcraft and Railcraft to share their liquid tanks, liquid pipes, etc. We've seen multiple microblock API's with Chickenbone's brilliant implementation rolled into Forge. We've seen the massive surge in popularity for managed modpacks (basically package management for first party and third party minecraft distributable). So not only full mod api's and basic package management, but brilliant new functionality exposed in wonderful api's. And half a decade later, Notch/Mojang still can't roll a basic mod api for the game (and their 'plugin-api', which has been in development since 2010 and is still unreleased, is woefully underfeatured compared to what the community offers today from multiple different third party modloaders). But why does it matter? No one looks down on Jobs for being bad at product design. Because he wasn't a designer by trade, he was a leader. Notch created an amazing platform and has handled it rather well. I'd love to have seen a lot of things prioritized or handled way sooner, but in the end, no one can question the success of his idea. This coming from a longtime Minecrafter (pre-survival) and current host of an FTB-based server.
heretoplug 13y ago
Everything that is wrong with Minecraft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap87xnjOh8E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap87xnjOh8E In short, Notch seems to have lost his focus as soon as he started taking more vacations[1] and organizing minecon. The guys lazy. To this day, combat since alpha has not expanded, and is still boring. [1] - http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/2618/1355959516258.png http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/2618/1355959516258.png
Oculus 13y ago
I think he prefers it the exact same way. It's just not natural for him (and most people) to say nothing when someone asks him what he's working on. Even if it's just some small hacked together game he's still going to be honest. Most developers love showing off what they're working on no matter what it is because there's usually no downside. Due to his popularity, people go out and start telling everyone that Notch is working on this new super awesome game even though Notch is just fooling around with an idea.

by rndmize 13y ago

citricsquid 13y ago

Markus was never involved in Scrolls development. Markus had been good friends with Jahkob (Mojang co-founder) for many years prior to Minecraft, Jahkob had been playing with an idea for a long time that Markus liked (what has eventually become Scrolls) and Mojang was formed, in part, to back Scrolls. Markus was never going to develop Scrolls; it was Jahkob's project and he formed a team to build it. Scrolls has become a full game that is being constantly developed, you can buy it now: http://scrolls.com http://scrolls.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrolls_(video_game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrolls_(video_game)

pfisch 13y ago
I don't know that I would call scrolls a full game. It has about as many cards as like 25-30% of a single magic set.
- vorce 13y ago
  I'd say it's definitely a full game. So many hours of fun and tinkering even with the relatively low scroll count so far. And it's just going to get better, still Beta. I very much recommend trying out Scrolls if you're into deep strategy games.
  - justjimmy 13y ago
    I'm surprised you think Scrolls is a deep strategy game. I've only sunk no more than 10 hours and I already see everyone with the same decks (3 factions, 3 decks). Not much room for different strategy since there are hardly any cards. Scroll's complexity isn't 'complex' - it's needlessly cumbersome and tiring - having to do consistent mathematics in your head isn't fun (for me anyway). Hearthstone is way more complex simply due to the 9 (vs 3) classes.
    - vorce 13y ago
      I have played it for around 2 months and still find new things to play, test and learn. The hex grid not only makes the game unique for a TCG, but also enables a lot of tough strategical decisions. 3 factions yes, a fourth on the way. 3 decks? No way! Decks evolve constantly and new ones pop up, some die out - seems very healthy for such a small, young game so far :) Just my 2 cents and experience.
- SimHacker 13y ago
  Quantity does not necessarily imply quality. In fact, some times, and especially with games, just the opposite. The world doesn't need any more POGs or Beanie Babies.
- pessimizer 13y ago
  That's the same thing I say about poker. Not nearly as complex as Apples to Apples.

asiekierka 13y ago

Indeed, the mods for Minecraft are great. The only problem is nobody made a mod to REMOVE things. I'd remove the End any time - it's just a pointless place that a very few very specific things use. Disclosure: I also run a modded Minecraft server (with an easy-to-use launcher and many nifty features), if anyone cares.

lsiebert 13y ago
Is it survival? I have yet to find a nice survival server.
- zalzane 13y ago
  I recommend 2b2t.org, as it is probably the best survival server out there. It's a pvp-enabled anarchy server. Nobody can get banned for any reason whatsoever. The server is ~3 years old and the map has never been reset. What this means is that from spawn to about 5km away from spawn is desolate wasteland. You have to travel at least 10-20km out before you find areas that havent been burned down or still have regular trees. At about 30km from spawn, the chances of your base being discovered drop pretty fast, but most people keep their full blown bases at 100+km out, with advance bases 20ish km from spawn that they use as temp bases for raiding people near spawn. There's pretty much two things you do on 2b2t after establishing a base - exploring to find other peoples bases, and raiding them. There's hundreds of bases that are plenty old, many of which still have loot in them, with new bases being created by new people every day. Here's a handful of pics I took of the spawn, some bases, and a few megaprojects I found: http://imgur.com/a/sGoRc#0 http://imgur.com/a/sGoRc#0 If you want minecraft 'survival' mode, you'll get it on this server. </endshill>
  - AndyKelley 13y ago
    This sounds like my kind of server. I love this idea - see what happens when no rules of any kind are set up. A kind of "hands off" deist approach.
- trafficlight 13y ago
  With PvP or without?

ordinary 13y ago

I think the fundamental principles behind release early, release often are sound. I doubt Minecraft would've been as big a success if it'd been released as a fait accompli. The continuous addition of new content is certainly what kept me coming back. In fact, the main reason I stopped playing was that my RSS feed stopped working, which made it seem like they'd halted development. That said, I can imagine that Minecraft has set dauntingly high expectations for him. He wouldn't be the first to suffer under that pressure. Albert Einstein famously said that his years at the patent office were the happiest of his life, because no one expected him to lay golden eggs.

skore 13y ago
> That said, I can imagine that Minecraft has set dauntingly high expectations for him. High expectations coupled with basically unlimited funding really is a problem. I see Notch as a highly creative (if unstructured) programmer and people like that usually do their best work when facing constraints.
tetha 13y ago
"Release early and release often" is not connected to "(iteratively) fleshing features out", though. I'm currently learning this, and while feeling weird, it's a very powerful way to release features very early, check back with users and then extend from there. This happens in some areas of minecraft, but on the other hand, there's vast areas where it doesn't happen and people aren't happy about it.

nness 13y ago

Unrelated, but on the matter of Minecraft mods; I really wish we had a nice modding API that didn't involve haphazardly de-compiling the Java byte-code to make changes.

workbench 13y ago
Yet another feature promised time and time again from notch but eventually ignored and forgotten because it required more than an afternoon of work.
nemof 13y ago
that STILL hasn't been introduced? I thought that had been promised literally years ago.
- anton_gogolev 13y ago
  John Siracusa had a epic rant on that exact topic on ATP #25 ( http://atp.fm/ http://atp.fm/ ). I myself was baffled to find out that modding involves unpacking a JAR file, overwriting .class files with modded ones and packing the whole thing back up. Disaster.
  - petemc_ 13y ago
    Why is this a disaster? My 10 year old son has been doing this for years without any problems. It has encouraged him to start poking around other game parts and learning lots in the process. Edit: There are also many easy to use front ends for adding mods and working with different minecraft versions etc.
    - smackfu 13y ago
      * Because you can only run one patch at a time. * Because your patches only work against one version of the game. * Because you are directly updating files, so both of the previous restrictions can easily be violated, which tends to cause a crash on startup. The front-ends work around this lunacy by keeping multiple clean copies of the entire install, at multiple version levels, so that each mod can trash it on its own or use the version it needs.

6ren 13y ago

1. if Notch had your perfectionistic attitude, he wouldn't have released anything - so, no minecraft. Also, Elon Musk wouldn't have had three rocket disasters - no SpaceX. And Mark Zuckerberg certainly wouldn't have began The Facebook. Similar for google, linux, Windows (especially!) Of course, all these guys were lucky... but isn't it striking how fortune favours the brave? 2. Given that Notch had all this incredible success even though he's so "half-assed", imagine what you could do if you adopted his approach? (For the record, I thought 0x10c was a stupid idea. OTOH I really liked the idea of the minecraft world - where the cube basis is universal and malleable, and sacrificing nicer graphics for that - though the actual game doesn't grab me. I think Notch is awesome and inspirational, and should keep doing what he values - regardless of my opinions!)

GoNB 13y ago
Nobody on HN seems to want to address it, so I will. It's pretty obvious: Notch is incredibly wealthy and no longer is interested in programming. Can you blame the guy? Most of us would probably stop programming if we had his never ending flow of income. Minecraft is like milk: It's always selling and he hardly has to think about working anymore. Mojang doesn't even have to update Minecraft, the community drives it. The mobile version has reigned the iOS store for months. It's the holy grail of perpetual passive income we all wish we had that Notch has obtained.
- zanny 13y ago
  If I had enough money not to care anymore, I'd still write code because I feel it achieves something worthwhile. I've contributed a bunch to KDE in the past, I would just work on it "full time" (aka, whenever I wanted to).
- workbench 13y ago
  He is interested in programming though, he does several Lundem Dares a year. He's just never been interested in seeing projects through to the end (unless it can be finished in an afternoon). He's never actually completed a project. Minecraft is half finished and filled with little steps in every directions never quite doing any step properly.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

marvin 13y ago

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?

marshray 13y ago
"Ever since superstar success your work has been half assed" Where does one find such friends?
hobs 13y ago
While I think the overly negative comments are overblown, the source (imo) is that there is definitely a group of people that think Notch is the best thing since sliced bread, and the truth is that he had a somewhat meritorious technical accomplishment that went onto be a commercial success, and they cant stand it.
workbench 13y ago
Don't work publicly on it then, problem solved. Think he enjoys the part of the project where he gets fans excited and talks about huge ideas more than actually working on and finishing a job.
asdasf 13y ago
>Can you imagine someone saying this to your face? Yes. And since I am fully aware of my tendency to lose interest in projects part way through and move on to something else, I don't publicize them while they are in the "hey this idea sounds cool" stage. Thus avoiding having people point out the objective reality that I don't finish much of what I start.
vor_ 13y ago

kayoone 13y ago

I think the approach taken by Notch is more like playing around with an idea to see if it works. The fact that he now runs a multi million dollar business doesnt seem to have changed this and its probably a good thing. We all have unfinished/failed projects laying around somewhere..he has is just way more popular than most of us and has chosen to make his development efforts somewhat public, which might have been a mistake as he now realizes. IMO, hes still building games with the right attitude. He plays around and tries to find a cool idea, just as he has done before.

magicalist 13y ago

Look at massive games like Skyrim or GTA that have multiple gameplay systems in their vast amount of content that are only sketches and not at all fulfilling the potential they suggest. Then remember that dozens to hundreds of people work on those games. Then repeat the phrase "I dunno whether its a matter of expectations" and think carefully about how that phrase applies to you. Of course hundreds of modders are going to end up fleshing out what one guy (and then a handful of guys) could not. The nether system being "pretty sorry" at release is almost a parody of a statement. If it's not meant to be, I guess the implication is that he should have released it only after "finishing" it? Or not added features at all, instead focusing on more core features? Those approaches have a massive hidden assumption that alternate-universe-Notch would have taken those paths and then focussed on features you wanted, rather than spending months, on, say, making a higher height limit, or better biome distribution, or better cow grazing behavior, etc etc all of which would not have added substantially to the fun of playing the game. Minecraft was and is an incredibly fun game. I'm not suggesting you should kiss the feet of every stray thought Notch has, but I find the people that write these kinds of posts have lost any sort of perspective. Think of the number of elaborate and most of all actually fun games written by one person that have not only shipped to players, but also were fun to play at every stage of an open development process. The number is tiny, and the reason is that it's really really hard. Maybe people don't have game making experience? Making games is hard, making a fun game is much much harder, and making a fun game out of a bunch of different interlocking systems that is relatively bug free is basically a miracle if we look at an existing games to attempted games ratio. Now, whether or not Notch owes you updates to the Nether for life for your $15 for Minecraft is a whole other story, but Minecraft has been fun to play in every incarnation I've played since Alpha. Calling his work half-assed is bullshit, even if we only compare his output to the actual output of every other aspiring video game maker that has ever existed. I'd say he's in some pretty good company on the far end of the curve on that one.

criley2 13y ago
I call his work bullshit after seeing how smoothly Minecraft development was under Jeb, and seeing how mod developers work. It wasn't until a talented and motivated developer took over the project that quality improved, IMO. And mod developers are out there writing far more fleshed out, balanced and reliable code despite the fact that they still do not have access to the unobfuscated source. Minecraft is still released without an API, or any mod tools, and no source. When I look at the brilliant and dedicated work of those who reverse engineer the binary for every major release, building third party mod api's like Bukkit and Forge, and allowing for ever-more-smooth updates of a spaghetti of dozens of disparate mods... it's hard not to look down on Notch's work. I mean hell, the teams reverse-engineering and supporting so many mods are unpaid, and small. They've gotten better, faster, and are more dedicated. In the past year we've seen unified liquid API under Forge allowing for mods like IC2, Buildcraft and Railcraft to share their liquid tanks, liquid pipes, etc. We've seen multiple microblock API's with Chickenbone's brilliant implementation rolled into Forge. We've seen the massive surge in popularity for managed modpacks (basically package management for first party and third party minecraft distributable). So not only full mod api's and basic package management, but brilliant new functionality exposed in wonderful api's. And half a decade later, Notch/Mojang still can't roll a basic mod api for the game (and their 'plugin-api', which has been in development since 2010 and is still unreleased, is woefully underfeatured compared to what the community offers today from multiple different third party modloaders). But why does it matter? No one looks down on Jobs for being bad at product design. Because he wasn't a designer by trade, he was a leader. Notch created an amazing platform and has handled it rather well. I'd love to have seen a lot of things prioritized or handled way sooner, but in the end, no one can question the success of his idea. This coming from a longtime Minecrafter (pre-survival) and current host of an FTB-based server.

heretoplug 13y ago

Everything that is wrong with Minecraft: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap87xnjOh8E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap87xnjOh8E In short, Notch seems to have lost his focus as soon as he started taking more vacations[1] and organizing minecon. The guys lazy. To this day, combat since alpha has not expanded, and is still boring. [1] - http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/2618/1355959516258.png http://img826.imageshack.us/img826/2618/1355959516258.png

Oculus 13y ago

I think he prefers it the exact same way. It's just not natural for him (and most people) to say nothing when someone asks him what he's working on. Even if it's just some small hacked together game he's still going to be honest. Most developers love showing off what they're working on no matter what it is because there's usually no downside. Due to his popularity, people go out and start telling everyone that Notch is working on this new super awesome game even though Notch is just fooling around with an idea.