Pete Dodd Dot Com (.us)

I tend to use this personal blog to talk about personal stuff and use PSNerds as a place to talk (literally… as in podcast) or write about videogame stuff.  But I wanted to put together some thoughts on this little indie game I’ve been playing lately and I kinda think it fits in more here than it does there…  even though here there are actually female readers.  The PSNerds only has one girl visitor and her name is my wife.  And girls don’t like videogames.  Or admit that they do.  Except my wife.  But she also farts a lot.

So this is not for you, girls who hate videogames!  Or maybe it is.  I dunno.

Anyway, there’s this dude over in Europe somewhere… Sweeden maybe?   The story goes (at least what I remember of it, maybe I’m making all of this up) is that he quit his job working at a corporate videogame company to work on an indie project so he could make something on his own that had a bit more soul to it.  He also enters competitions to make games in 48 hours and posts mesmerizing time lapse videos of it. He is large and has a beard, so you know he is good people.

Flash forward to today and he has a game up and running, called Minecraft, that isn’t nearly complete but he is selling access to the game (and all future revisions) for cheap now with a plan to up the price once the online play beta starts… and it will probably go even higher when it’s officially “released.”   I put that in quotes because I think this is the future of indie gaming, get something together that is fun to play and get people playing it early, which helps further fund your development of the game and also gets you a ton of feedback about what people like and dislike.  It’s fucking brilliant, actually.  He is getting paid while he makes the game, like he would at a huge development house, but he is making it on his own terms, by himself.

But all of this feel good indie-elitism aside, none of it would mean shit if the game was a piece of crap.  It isn’t.  In fact it’s one of the best games I’ve played in a long time.  Actually at this point it is barely a game.  The term sandbox gets thrown around videogames quite a bit, usually in a game like Grand Theft Auto where you have this huge, open world and you can do whatever you want.   Games like that can be quite fun, but they are missing the key piece that made playing in a sandbox as a kid fun…  building shit.    I mean, sure, pushing my little trucks around my sandbox was cool, but it was much cooler when i made a sand mountain and sand jumps to play on.

This is what Minecraft excels at.  You start the game as this little blocky dude in this huge world with absolutely no directions given as to what to do (the tutorial on the main menu is grayed out at this point, it’s likely going to show up in an update down the line).   As of now there is no goal in the game, except the meta-goal of every game: go have some fun.    So you start punching a tree with your blocky little hand and it breaks up into chunks and you collect the wood.  You then put the wood together to make a work bench.  Then with the work bench you start putting the wood together to make a pick axe.  Then you dig a tunnel into a mountain, collecting all the dirt and stone you break up as you burrow deeper.  And then you head back to your work bench to make better things with all the new stuff you got.   Then you take all your stone you got from your tunnel and you build a house.   Next thing you know it’s 4am, you have 3 houses, a tower, a series of tunnels and you have plans on building a huge walkway in the sky.

This just scratches the surface of what you can do in the game.  In fact, it’s probably quicker to make a list of things you *CAN’T* do.  Every week the developer, a young dude who goes by Notch, adds new stuff to build.   Want to make tracks and a mine cart for your tunnels?  Done.  Want to make a saddle and put it on a pig and ride the pig?  Done.   Want to make a bow and arrow and shoot cows, take their leather and make a hat?  Done and done and done.

The only thing missing right now is that you can only play it by yourself.   Communities have sprung up all over the place where people come together to talk about the game and share screenshots of the stuff they are building.  In fact, that’s how I found the game.   I frequent a message board called Neogaf (even though after like a year I still can’t even post replies on topics there) and saw a thread about the game.   After reading about two pages I headed over to minecraft.net, sent the dude $12 (what it comes out to after paypal turns the money into euros) and was playing on my own.   At this point I have like 5 bookmarks of different sites and message boards dedicated to people playing and talking about the game.

But all of that is well and good, but what I really want to do is play this game with my friends.   I want to build some crazy ass castle thing in one section while my wife (yeah, she’s hooked too) is building some crazy ass house with a giant garden somewhere else, and then one of my friends is building a tower into the clouds while another friend is killing all the monsters he can find while yet another friend is digging a hole to china, just for fun.   To me, this will be the essence of cooperative, social gaming.   There are monsters to kill (though you can play a mode without them) but killing them isn’t the point of the game.   Doing whatever you want is the point.  So if you get all your friends together on one server, some may want to work together to build something huge.  Others might want to build their own thing but let people connect tunnels or whatever to it.   It will be the mix of people all doing different stuff that will make it so neat.   Whenever I get sick of building something I’ll have so much fun just exploring the land to see what all of my friends have done.   When I wake up in the morning the first thing I might do is run over to see how far friend X got on the giant thing-a-ma-bob he was working on the night before.

The multiplayer beta (aka test… for those not up on videogame lingo) starts soon.  Sounds like it is a week or two away.  Right now the list of friends I have playing this game is low…  though I may end up also playing with people I barely know from any of those random sites I frequent.  But want to play with friends!  I’m even going to look into hosting my own server (a level of technical sophistication i usually don’t have – haha) so we can control how it plays and who joins us (aka keep out the random assholes who are bound to server-hop just to destroy people’s shit).

I am also really excited to see some more typical gameplay modes thrown into this sandbox world.   Like, I envision a game of capture the flag where there is a 1 hour section at the start where you build your own base (and stock up on supplies to mess up the other teams).   How fucking cool would that be?   Also, like I mentioned before, there are monsters in the world.  They typically only come out at night…  and they can actually be kinda scary (the sound is amazing).  It would be very, very intense to play a multiplayer game where you built stuff as usual but you only got one life.  When you died you were done.  I certainly wouldn’t always want to play this mode, but how intense would it be after you spent 5 hours building your fortress to see a monster trying to kill you knowing that if you die all of that work is lost.   I mean, I can’t think of a videogame that has higher stakes than that, other than online casinos where you bet real money (and one would be hard pressed to even consider that a videogame at all).

So consider this blog post an attempt by me to rope as many of my friends (both real life and internet) into playing this game as possible, hopefully all on one server when the multiplayer starts.   I’m guessing only like 3 people will bite, but I have such an extreme love for the game that I had to write it all out to make sense of it.  As for system requirements, I doubt they are even slightly high.  You can play the game in your browser or as a standalone download.  It’s a very simple (but charming) game graphically.   Any computer made this decade can probably run it, Mac or PC (but not iphone or ipad, dammit).

I guess I’ll finish with a few pictures showing some of the stuff I’ve been working on.  Everything in these shots I built, this area was just some beach and grass.

^^^Here is the inside of the first big building I made.  Over to the left I put my storage, work bench and oven.  Over to the right I breakdance.   Nothing fancy here, this is only like 2 hours into the game.

^^^The building to the left is the building you just saw inside of.  The tower to the right now has a giant stick figure man on top, i pretend he is the god we all pray to.  Coming out of that you see my high walkway that leads to another settlement that I don’t have pictures of.  Also, off the building to the left is where my huge system of tunnels is that i dig into to get all the stone and dirt I need to make this stuff.

^^^This is a giant hole I dug into the ground for no good reason other than that it was fun.   I then made a trench to it from the ocean and now it’s 1/4 filled with water.   This is all connected to my system of tunnels.

^^^And this is back to my original settlement of buildings.  This is after 10+ hours of work.  I dug out a hole about 10 layers deep in the entire area.  This is right on the water so I held all the water from flowing in with glass.  I also made the start of my tunnel system which is directly below me all glass, and you can see a glass bridge in there.   You can now see the stick figure we all pray to…  and i had a shitton of extra dirt so i decided to make a modern art masterpiece that took FOREVER to build but I am very, very happy with how it came out.   I also have 2 other huge, blossoming settlements on this map, all connected via air walkways and tunnels.   Eventually, 500 hours from now I want to have this entire map developed in one way or another.  And to think, this area was once just a beach and some grass….

So if any of this interest you, let me know.  I will also answer any questions to anyone starting out, as the lack of directions is a bit daunting at first (though it took me maybe 15 minutes to get Arnee up to speed with it).   Just hit me up via email, facebook or twitter.