PC Gamer's spies are everywhere. When developers write in their heart-embossed, miniature-lock diaries, a PC Gamer agent is there to look underneath their pillow, flip through it while they're at gymnastics practice, and pass on the intimate secret of who they be crushin' on to you.
Of course, when an independent developer wants to openly share what it's up to, it saves us the hard work of bedroom infiltration. Minecraft developer Mojang Specifications has done just that, and they plan to provide us with behind-the-scenes information about what they're working on about every other week. Today, Jakob Porser writes about the current state of Mojang's kitchen, about the dev's plans for adorable, terrifying merchandise and grants a further hint about Mojang's next game.
Hello there!
My name is Jakob Porser and along with Markus "Notch" Persson and Carl Manneh, we represent the founders of the newly-created game studio Mojang. As of today I will be blogging about our daily life here at the office and about the different projects we are doing at Mojang. The plan is to update the blog every other week and hopefully I will have some interesting things to share with you guys.
"But why isn't Minecraft creator Notch writing this blog!?", you may ask. Because he is busy implementing flashy new features in Minecraft Survival Multi Player (SMP). From reading your requests on his Twitter, I'm thinking you much rather have him keep doing that than blogging!
With that sorted, I am going to tell you a little bit about what has been going on lately. Last Monday we got access to our office and also our new hardware. Unfortunately we didn't get any furniture until Friday, so Notch and I spent the better part of the week in his kitchen, taking up all but a few centimeters of his kitchen table with our computers. It wasn't bad at all, to be honest. The espresso maker was at arms length!
Anyway, today we got some of our furniture and officially moved in to our office. We still haven't gotten our chairs, but we found some leftover kitchen chairs we can use temporarily. I guess we aren't completely out of the kitchen yet, but we are getting there!
Now that we finally got our computers up and running in the office, we can get back to doing some work. As I mentioned, notch is adding features in SMP. He recently finished server side health and is moving on to server side inventory. With server side health, players will finally be able to kill and get killed in multiplayer games, so start crafting swords and armor, people! I'm thinking you are going to need it.
Once server side inventory is completed, Minecraft will enter beta phase. Keep your eyes peeled for more information about this and check out his Twitter or his developer blog .
Apart from developing Minecraft, we are firing up a new game project. Some of you may already have heard about this through Twitter where I have dropped some vague hints as to what the game will be about. We feel that it is still a bit early to give out any substantial information about it, but we are looking forward to when we can start to leak information and gathering future customer input, so stay tuned. I will be managing this project, so add me on Twitter if you want more regular updates.
Oh, I almost forgot! I have some great news for you Minecraft fans out there. We have recently finalized a deal with a large merchandise distributor. Soon you will be able to order some awesome Minecraft merchandise! I have seen some of the items that you will be able to order and it looks really, really good. Don't get discouraged if you can't find the long-awaited Creeper plushie. We are still discussing different products to add, and some require more time to create then others. Rest assured, we will make sure the need of Creeper plushies gets satisfied even if we will have to sew them ourselves! We hope that at least some of the items will be available for order at the beginning of December. As soon as we have more information on this, we will make sure you know about it on Twitter and through our blogs.
That's it for now. By the next blog update all of our employees will have moved in to the office and I plan on presenting them to you. Also, if you have requests about things you would like to read about in this blog, you can e-mail them to us at pcgamerblog@mojang.com.
Don't forget to add us on twitter and to check out the developer blog for a more day to day update.
@JahKob - Jakob Porser, Game Developer
@Notch - Markus Persson, Game Developer
@carlmanneh - Carl Manneh, CEO
http://notch.tumblr.com/ - Developer blog
http://www.minecraft.net - The number one source of joy throughout the world
Jakob Porser
Mojang
(Photos courtesy of Elin Zetterstrand.)
