Mojang-Specifications posts

Are you excited about Scrolls? So excited? Well, if you are looking forward to Mojang's next game that doesn't end with -craft, you might get a chance to alpha test it. The newsletter field at the bottom of the Scrolls website offers an opt-in for the alpha test for those interested in the virtual CCG. It's been around for a while now, but better late to the party than skipping it entirely! As mentioned before, alpha testers for Minecraft will also be introduced into the Scrolls alpha over time.

[Via Rock Paper Shotgun]

As promised, the 1.4 beta update for the hit sandbox game Minecraft has gone live via the game's auto-updater. The update has a number of new features, not the least of which is an updated logo for the game itself.

Other additions include adding very cute and cuddly wolves to the game's environment, the addition of bed that allow players to finally pick their own spawn points in the game. The infrastructure for added achievements and player stats to Minecraft has also been added to the game but the achievements and stats themselves won't actually show up until the next major update.

Fans (and there are a lot of you out there) of the indie sandbox game Minecraft can finally look forward to a major new update sometime this week. In a post on his Twitter page, the game's creator Markus "Notch" Perrson announced, "The plan is to release 1.4 this week."

The 1.4 patch will include "a rather ambitious statistics tracking and achievement system" according to a post on Notch's blog site. It will also include the previously announced addition of wolves (the cute kind) to the game as well as the ability to change your spawn point in the game. Beyond the 1.4 update Notch is looking to "spend soome time figuring out exactly what to do with the modding, which should result in a nice modding API."

Minecraft's success has been a huge surprise to pretty much everyone in the PC game community, especially for its creator Markus "Notch" Persson. In a new chat over at Rock Paper Shotgun he discusses the sandbox game's success and plans for its future.

The game is still in beta and won't be officially fone until the end of 2011 but Persson states, "We're going to keep updating it, releasing expansion packs for as long as people buy it." He also talks about possibly adding new features to Minecraft. And what about a sequel? He states, "I don't want to get stuck making Minecraft 2 and 3. It might make sense for the company – I understand that – and we can get other people to make Minecraft 2. But I personally want to make new games. It's more interesting."

Minecraft's creator Markus "Notch" Persson knows that the sales of his sandbox indie game are more than enough to allow him to make any future game he wants. While he continues development of Minecraft at his studio Mojang (the newly revealed game Scrolls is not primarily being made by Persson) he is already thinking about ideas of what his next game will be.

In a feature at Rock Paper Shotgun, Persson talks about those ideas which include a space trading simulation, a town sim game where, "You're just one character in the town, just living", and a football manager game with fantasy characters instead of humans (think Blood Bowl). Meanwhile the main development of Minecraft won't be completed until the end of 2011.

Mojang, the Sweden-based development team that's in charge of the hit indie sandbox game Minecraft, have announced its next project at GDC. It's a fantasy themed virtual collectible card-based strategy game called Scrolls.

Gamasutra has the first details on Scrolls which also has elements of board games. While there will be a single player campaign most of the game's focus will be online multiplayer matches where players will collect their cards (or "scrolls") and use them to summon units and cast spells on a battlefield that will resemble a chess board. Interestingly, Penny Arcade's Jerry "Tycho" Holkins will also be involved with Scrolls to help develop the game's fictional back story. The game will have a closed alpha test later this year and will consist of a number of players who originally bought the alpha version of Minecraft. The game itself will be free to play but with revenue generated from selling new "scrolls" to players.

A little while ago 2 Player Productions announced it was working on a documentary on the making of Minecraft and of the hit sandbox games' creator Markus "Notch" Persson. Originally the plan was to make a small 20 minute film of the first week of Persson's Sweden-based game development studio Mojang Specifications but now 2 Player Productions have announced plans to turn its Minecraft documentary into a feature film-length project.

To that end, the team has launched a Kickstarter.com web page with the gold to raise a whopping $150,000 by Saturday, March 26. So far the team has already raised about $9,000 with about 32 days to go. You can check out a six minute snip of the feature film after the jump. In addition a 20 minute version of the Minecraft documentary can be found over at GameTrailers.com.

Minecraft has proven to be the "little indie game that could" as the PC sandbox/adventure game created by Markus "Notch" Persson has continued to see steady sales with almost no marketing and no use of the typical PC download services. Today (in fact just a few minutes ago) Minecraft sold its 1 millionth digital copy, according to its stats page. That number is basically unheard of for a indie-made PC game and would be impressive for any PC exclusive game, period.

The game was first launched in an "alpha" stage in May 2009 which allowed people to buy the game and be assured they would get all of its future updates and expansions for free. Persson continued to update the game with new features but it took over a year for the game to reach 100,000 units sold. That would still be an impressive sales number for an indie PC game. However Minecraft rose rapidly in sales and popularity thanks to some well placed internet postings in the summer of 2010, including a rave review on Valve's Team Fortress 2 web site in July 2010. The game had sold 125,000 units in September but it only took just over four months for Minecraft to reach today's 1 million sales mark. Even when Minecraft moved into its beta stage last December (with a 25 percent raise in its price) sales of the game have yet to slow down.

While Persson was reportedly courted to join major developers like Valve and Bungie over the summer, he decided instead to stay in his native Sweden to launch his own indie game company Mojang Specifications. The company currently has six people, including Persson, on board where they work on improving and adding to Minecraft as well as a second, unnamed game project. In the meantime Minecraft itself is technically still not yet completed. Recently Persson stated that they were looking to finally "complete" the game by the end of 2011.

Minecraft is about to enter into the next phase of its popularity. The indie-made sandbox game is going to be releasing some official merchandise with the first items due to come out in early December, just in time for holiday shopping. The news comes from the newly launched Minecraft dev diary on the PC Gamer web site written by Jakob Porser, who is a co-founder of Mojang Specifications, the new studio formed thanks to the massive sales of MineCraft.

Porser says of the Minecraft gift items, "We are still discussing different products to add, and some require more time to create then others." However he hints strongly that Creeper plush toys similar to the one shown (made by a fan) are on their way.

It's been a little while since the last official blog update from the creator of Minecraft but this week Markus "Notch" Persson updated the site with a little more info on the upcoming Halloween update to the popular indie sandbox game (which should break the 450,000 unit sales barrier by the end of the day today).

He states that the update will include "six new block types (five of them have unique abilities), one new monster, a new dimension, and a couple of bug fixes." He also gives a business update stating that the development team at Mojang Specifications is now composed of six people "three programmers, one pixel artist, one CEO and one Business Developer."

Markus has also been updating his Twitter page constantly and in one update he states, "Yes, you will eventually be able to link servers with portals. NOT SOON, though." The idea of thousands of Minecraft players linking to their games via portals might turn this indie sandbox game into an MMO title ... maybe.