PC Gamer knows about your voyeuristic tendencies for the going-ons in developer offices. In the previous entry of the Minecraft Dev Diary , we got to meet the staff of Mojang and speculate about the developer's next game. In today's post we get to hear from the latest hires, learn how to pimp out an office, and get details on Minecraft fashion trends.
Heya!
My name is Carl Manneh , and together with Tobias Möllstam , we're the newest additions to the Mojang team. Jakob , who has been writing these diaries, asked me to fill in, so I'll try to give you an update in the Mojang world.
2011 couldn't have started in a better way. Minecraft got nominated in three different categories in both the GDCA and the IGF! We have decided to take the whole team to San Francisco at the end of next month to attend GDC. Notch is going to hold a talk at one of the sessions and we're all going to meet up with Minecraft fans, maybe even in an organized fashion. Daniel Kaplan , our business developer, and myself are going to try to line up a bunch of meetings with interesting companies that are located in San Francisco or attending the conference. Let us know if you're gonna be there and want to meet up!
Like that great news wasn't enough, the office euphoria continued as Minecraft recently passed 1 million (!) copies sold, which of course is a major milestone for us. Notch celebrated with champagne, assorted nuts and tipsy tweets. We all went nuts and joined the celebration at the weekly #gamingfriday . The millionth player is now wearing the millionth-player-cape in the game. Now that is a special cape.
The first week with everyone in the office, we held a Strategy Meeting Day (tm). We now have roadmaps for Minecraft, the new game and web stuff. We also started working with KanBan as development process which hopefully will help us reach the milestones we've set up for the year. Each morning we're having a short update meeting where everyone shares what they are working on. We're getting organized!
The newly-established dynamic duo of Jeb and Notch is really picking up momentum. They are planning to release nightly test builds that will run parallel to the Minecraft beta game. That will give daring players a chance to test the new features we're trying out as soon as they're implemented. The next major addition planned is proper modding support.
The new game that Jakob is working on is coming along nicely. We already have a prototype to play around with and JunkBoy has started working on some sketches to set the graphical style of the game. It looks nothing short of awesome. As the game development moves into the next phase, we're currently looking for a back-end developer to join Jakob and JunkBoy on the project.
Since January 1st we have had access to the whole office space and are able to start pimping it, Mojang-style. We're putting in new floors, a new kitchen, painting the walls, adding some artwork, new lighting, foam logos, and most importantly--putting in a Sonos sound system in all the rooms. The office is currently a big, noisy mess, and the refurbishment will take approximately 2 months, but it will be so worth it. At this time, we're too psyched to get going with things to even notice the random compass saw or hammer-drill. I'll try to document the process and post pictures here .
We finally got our hands on the smoking-hot official Minecraft t-shirts that ThinkGeek is making for us. The first batch they produced flew off the shelves in just a couple of days. Now they're back in stock. Make sure to get yours before they are gone again! We'll soon add more merchandise and make them available both on Minecraft.net and the upcoming launch of Mojang.com.
That's all for now, folks. For more frequent updates, make sure to follow us on Twitter, read Notch's blog, and keep refreshing Mojang.com until we release more.
Carl Manneh
Managing Director, Mojang
