Markus ‘Notch’ Perrson’s follow-up to Minecraft, space game 0x10c, which puts you in charge of a ship and a programmable computer, is “on ice” at the moment as the director of Mojang works through a “kind of weird creative block” that he says has “been going on for too long”.
Speaking to Polygon at GDC, Notch said how he’d brought on another developer to “make sure the game gets made” and that, currently, they have “two prototypes going on now. It’s not really fun yet, but it feels like it could be fun because there’s nothing to do in there yet.”
So not entirely encouraging news for fans who were hoping to be getting up to their wrists in computer code.
The developer’s also stepped away from Minecraft development entirely, leaving it up to Jens Bergensten. Nor does he play the game anymore, telling Polgon that “I think I played it for far too many, like hundreds of hours.” The last time he played he was “just running around and exploring, because that’s the part I never got bored of, just exploring.”
One of the surprising shifts with 0x10c, considering Minecraft’s moddability, is that it won’t support modding: “because with modding you can do literally anything […] and the idea within 0x10c was to have enough components going on so you can kind of just setup the components in the spaceship and just write the code inside the game.”
0x10c remains a compelling game concept but I’m still struggling to get a grasp on it as a complete entity, mainly because there’s been so little to see of it in action at this point but also because of the way that it sounds still only partly formed in Notch’s discussions of it. Whenever, if ever, the game is released I doubt it will much resemble what we’ve seen of it at this point.