The secret of Minecraft (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)

#171

Post by Pannoniae » Sun, Jul 28, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

momojo wrote: post #46

> I’m a writer, and don’t get me wrong: To publish a plain ol’ book that people actually want to read is still a solid achievement. But I think Markus Persson and his studio have staked out a new kind of achievement, a deeper kind: To make the system that calls forth the book, which is not just a story but a real magick manual that grants its reader (who consumes it avidly, endlessly, all day, at school, at night, un…

> My theory, if anyone wants to make something akin to minecraft in the future, is to do just enough, and not too much. Make a game that's delightful as a toy to pick and play around with; and resist the overwhelming urge to add more.

Yup, absolutely. It's very easy to get carried away with just adding more.... stuff, but more stuff isn't necessarily better if it doesn't improve the gameplay.

The game doesn't become better by adding another type of tree or new random building blocks or whatever, only if they actually offer something unique and cool.

Current Minecraft really suffers from this. Do we really need like 30 types of copper blocks?

Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)

#172

Post by giobox » Sun, Jul 28, 2024, 5:33 PM UTC

29athrowaway wrote: post #158

5636588 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called the Second-Mover Advantage.

Apple wasn't even the second mover. There were many smartphones and pocket PCs from a myriad of vendors by the time the iPhone appeared.

The concept of second mover advantage doesn't mean you have to go exactly second - your reply is somewhat pedantic - you just get the advantage by not being the very first. Apple absolutely enjoyed some second mover advantages in bringing iPhone to market.

The second mover advantages Apple enjoyed went beyond just the cellphone design too - they completely rearchitected the relationship between a carrier and a cellphone OEM. People forget that pre-iPhone, virtually all cellphones had to carry crappy software insisted on by the cell carrier - the iPhone was one of the first ever handsets that shipped with the OS completely under the control/design of the handset vendor with no network involvement. Just getting AT&T to agree to this alone was massive, and hadn't been figured out by any of the pre-existing smartphone manufacturers on the "first move" either. We take this for granted now across the industry that cellphones can easily arrive this way in carrier stores with little/no carrier interference.

Heck, pre-iPhone, it was close to impossible to buy a phone in an AT&T/"Cingular" store that didn't have AT&T/Cingular's logo custom printed on it, such was the extent of the carrier choke-hold on the OEM handset supply side. This was true of virtually all the carriers in North America at that time. Again today, it's rare a phone is branded with the carrier logos, and smartphones rarely ever now have bundled carrier software/OS changes at the user application level.

Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)

#173

Post by rightbyte » Sun, Jul 28, 2024, 5:42 PM UTC

iforgotpassword wrote: post #137

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly agree that Notch was standing on the shoulders of giant, brilliant Barth, and without Infiniminer we would never have gotten Minecraft. Zach's game design is so good that it makes you want to build, or build better games. You can clearly see the inspiration that took hold and the potential that Infiniminer and all Barth's other games absolutely exude. His games are worth playing not to sink time into but…

But maybe a bit of happy coincidence, or luck? Like, yes he made the final decision to use the music made by C418, but I really think you couldn't have made anything better. So, lucky those two got together? But then again, deciding to only occasionally start playing a song definitely was a great decision by notch. I'm really someone paying attention to soundtracks. I care and think about the music people put into ga…

The music nails it. The first time you play, it is magical. Like, I was swept away. I think the music was really important for the emotional state.

Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)

#174

Post by mmis1000 » Sun, Jul 28, 2024, 5:44 PM UTC

I think what make minecraft special is the game don't make much rules of how should you play it and it give you almost unlimited power to change the environment.

There is no game except minecraft allow you to make another game in it without third party tools. And there are no game except minecraft allow you to change the whole map.

Want a castle on the cliff? you just build it. Don't like that mountain that block your viewpoint? You just bulldoze it. The game don't judge you. Want to make a mini game and make the rule? The game have tools build in for you. Redstone and command block are here to allow you to make your desired creation.

And it's just the base game, we haven't talk about mods yet. There are countless of mods that make content impossible in original base game possible. And each give you new experience about this game.

To me. minecraft don't feel like a game. It's more like a creation platform that allow people to prototype all kinds of thoughts and play around it no matter you know how to code or not.

Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)

#175

Post by Auracle » Sun, Jul 28, 2024, 6:12 PM UTC

iamwil wrote: post #101

Auracle wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, for younger kids I can see the appeal. They might not have a device they can easily use to go on the internet, so you’d be able to do things your friends can’t and vice versa. I’ve long mulled on the idea of some kind of game where large aspects of it are randomized/generated so that no two installations would have the same stuff, recipes, whatever. I think that’d be neat and get rid of the website issue.

Those are rouge-likes. They still have wikis. See Spleunky and Hades.

Nah, I was more envisioning something like a multiplayer game where each player has spells they can learn by doing certain joystick/mouse/vr controller movements (or whatever), and both those movements and the spells themselves are uniquely randomized as much as they can be. You’d need to discover what you can do, and at least with a group of friends those spells would be pretty unique to you, along with which ones are easier or harder to do.

It probably wouldn’t be balanced but it’d be fun.

Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)

#176

Post by 10hr » Sun, Jul 28, 2024, 6:55 PM UTC

ineptech wrote: post #107

lolinder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your complaint is essentially that Microsoft released a new version of the game under the same name, which is not compatible with the old one because it's not actually quite the same game. That's a reasonable complaint, but doesn't constitute "losing" anything. I'm still following some of the same Java Edition YouTubers that I've been following for more than 10 years now (and they're still producing content weekly!).…

We've indisputably lost whatever Minecraft would be today if notch hadn't sold it. We can't know what that is, maybe it would've sucked. What we got instead feels like just another corporate studio game, a good one, yes, but we already have a lot of those.

Halloween update was really just so good

I enjoyed Minecraft with less RPG mechanics overall

Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)

#177

Post by lolinder » Sun, Jul 28, 2024, 7:34 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #163

lolinder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your complaint is essentially that Microsoft released a new version of the game under the same name, which is not compatible with the old one because it's not actually quite the same game. That's a reasonable complaint, but doesn't constitute "losing" anything. I'm still following some of the same Java Edition YouTubers that I've been following for more than 10 years now (and they're still producing content weekly!).…

> Your complaint is essentially that Microsoft released a new version of the game under the same name, which is not compatible with the old one because it's not actually quite the same game. That's a reasonable complaint, but doesn't constitute "losing" anything. If enough people are pushed onto a new system, then yes we do lose the ease of the old system.

That may be true in the abstract but has not been really demonstrated in this thread.

I spent the rest of my comment detailing the ways in which everything I ever liked about Minecraft is still available—do you have anything to add in support of the idea that something has been lost, or just this abstract observation?

Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)

#178

Post by kjkjadksj » Sun, Jul 28, 2024, 8:22 PM UTC

ineptech wrote: post #71

rootforce wrote: post #23

I’ve been playing Minecraft off and on since beta, and I’ve been able to introduce each of my kids as they’ve gotten old enough to play. It is pretty amazing, they all started in creative running around punching random things and now each one has their own way they like to play. One loves to build, another mini games, survival, parkour, mods etc. we are currently watching MCC live and it’s like the Super Bowl. They a…

It's hard not to mourn what was lost though. Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox. It's nice that they've added a bunch o…

There are still entire ecosystems of minecraft mods. Launchers are popular that hook into these systems and essentially give you specific minecraft package environments for each just like software environments to manage multiple conflicting sets of dependencies on a single machine.

https://www.curseforge.com/

Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)

#179

Post by kjkjadksj » Sun, Jul 28, 2024, 8:24 PM UTC

superb_dev wrote: post #93

ineptech wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard not to mourn what was lost though. Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox. It's nice that they've added a bunch o…

I dislike the auth changes as well, but it hasn’t had any impact on server hosting in my experience. It’s still just as easy as getting the right JVM and running the jar. The only thing new is the EULA you have to accept on first launch

The auth changes locked me out of my minecraft alpha account. Apparently I had a period of time to link my minecraft account with my microsoft account and that is gone now. I just use a pirated launcher now since they made it so I can't play the game I bought anymore otherwise. I miss playing on servers though.

Re: The secret of Minecraft (2014)

#180

Post by kjkjadksj » Sun, Jul 28, 2024, 8:27 PM UTC

256_ wrote: post #83

I'm almost surprised nobody mentioned beta 1.7.3 yet. Some people, myself included, consider it to be the last good version of the game. It came before the adventure update, beta 1.8, in 2011. To put it simply, 1.8 is the inflection point where Minecraft stopped being a sandbox and started being, as I once saw someone call it, a "pseudo-RPG". Obviously, this view is not common (EDIT: judging by some responses, maybe…

The thing is, you don't have to play the rpg aspect of it at all. You can still play the same game you played in beta 1.7.3 and get benefits like more variety of blocks for building and better automated farm setups leveraging the newer items like unmeltable ice. No one is forcing you to slay the end dragon.