Minecraft creator discusses his new game, 0x10c

Creator of Minecraft Markus “Notch” Persson has released a new video of his in-development adventure title – 0x10c.

The video doesn’t show much – it’s less a gameplay video so much as an art and graphics test – but Notch does disclose a few more details in an interview with PC Gamer.

The goal is to have it feel a bit like [US sci-fi show] Firefly,” said Notch. “You can try to land on a planet but you mess up and, instead of having the ship just explode like it would in real life, the landing gear gets broken. Then you have to try to fix that by finding resources.”

He continues, “Instead of the adventure being flying from here to here, it’s: ‘I set the destination, oh god I hit a small asteroid and the cloaking device broke’. I think they really nailed that kind of emergent aspect in [spaceship simulation game] FTL.”

The game is still in the very early stages, and the direction in which it will be taken isn’t quite yet decided. However, Notch has revealed that the player will control a ship with a 16-bit brain – a brain that you can program yourself.

It’s an ambitious idea, as the challenge is of course to make programming accessible to Neanderthals like me who don’t have the first clue of how to go about it. “I’m trying to design the game so you don’t have to know programming but you can share the code,” said Notch. “If you have a friend who’s made this really awesome docking algorithm, you can put that on a floppy disk within the game and put that into your computer.”

Notch does have plans to include multiplayer, but amusingly he said that he’ll only do that once the game is actually fun – which, according to the developer, nothing in it is at the moment.

“With Minecraft I waited too long to add multiplayer, so that was a huge hassle. So now, as soon as it’s fun, I’m going to do the multiplayer. But nothing in the game is fun right now. I need to figure out what is actually a fun game mechanic in all of this,” he said.

Check out the video below: