81–90 of 149 posts
I'm amazed how much of editing he actually does by hand (like growing/shrinking indentation) and mouse. That sort of switching between actual coding and lexical editing would kill my flow.
Btw, this is 2014 and I feel like we would already be able to play a simple game like Doom in the browser, just like the real thing. But no.. --edit-- ...multiplayer with several people, of course.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? https://wiki.mozilla.org/Legal/Infringement_Notices/3_June_2...
Watching Notch hacking on the Ludum Dare competition is such a comforting experience - to me he is the Bob Ross of game development. He also seems to end up developing the same thing over and over again with different shades of green on the leaves. Even though you may don't like his style, you have to admire his pragmatism, productivity and humbleness.
is this really live? I mean -- hardly see him pause for thought or anything. Interesting to see he just uses plain 'ol Eclipse (Eclipse FTW!).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
is this really live? I mean -- hardly see him pause for thought or anything. Interesting to see he just uses plain 'ol Eclipse (Eclipse FTW!).
Yeah it's really live - he's done a lot of work on stuff similar to this so he's probably got a mental checklist of everything that needs to happen. He's pretty good at what he does: making games! Rarely is watching somebody write code entertaining, but he makes it so.
I would love to see someone make such a list explicit and then post it as a submission here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The analogy is apt. Notch isn't known for being a stellar programmer.
I'd rather be a successful programmer than a stellar one (probably).
Minecraft itself was a clone of the game "infiniminer". Whose developer had given up and stopped work after the source code was stolen.
When I think of the rise of Minecraft I am drawn to a few things he did differently.
1) He set up a way for customers to pay him for the game early (as soon as he had a minimum viable product). This gave him tons of feedback, money to keep working, and incentive to keep going because people were constantly asking him for features and tweaks.
2) He employed a simple and fun mechanic that allowed users to create their own things in the game (forts castles etc).
3) all of the content is procedurally generated. So every time you play it you get a different experience to some extent.
4) From very early on you would get weekly updates pushed out constantly adding new features. For most people new things were being added far faster than they could get bored with them.
5) it ran everywhere.
6) He didn't focus on graphics. He made design choices that would drastically simplify development at the expense of quality and/or performance. This lent itself to a blocky 'style' that was both easy to handle and visually unique.
What do you guys think? am I missing anything?
I'm so impressed watching Notch program in realtime. "Last Minute Christmas Chopping" was an eye opener for me. ( http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview... ). I was totally baffled when he started to draw the ascii character map pixel by pixel in an 48h competition, but the result was usable and actually quite simple. My takeaway is this: Doing something quick and dirty for a first draft and imp…
> What I don't get is, why he seems to like Dart so much. Dart has a good mix of fast live-reload dev workflow, great IDE editing and debugging experience as well as productive optional typing analysis and feedback. Which seems to suit @notch's GTD/experimental coding style.
I found these hilarious: https://github.com/xNotch/dark/issues
Watching Notch hacking on the Ludum Dare competition is such a comforting experience - to me he is the Bob Ross of game development. He also seems to end up developing the same thing over and over again with different shades of green on the leaves. Even though you may don't like his style, you have to admire his pragmatism, productivity and humbleness.