In real life, game development sounds hard. You've got to create, debug and fix all manner of problems. A bug could appear in only the most specific and hard to duplicate circumstances. Or an errant line of code could cause the entire floor to disappear, killing everyone on your level. But in this Minecraft visualisation, released by Mojang, development looks like a game in itself. The avatars of its creators float about, zapping features into existence. In eight minutes we're taken from Alpha 1.2.6 to yesterday's release of Minecraft 1.5. That serene unfolding of pretty development branches represents 826 days of hard coding graft.
Each dot represents a different game file, with file types classified by colour. When a dev floats past for a laser zap, they've made a change to the file - be it bug fix or feature add. For real development spectacle, skip over to around the 4 minute mark - the merging of singleplayer and multiplayer files results in a firework display of colour.
It's a fascinating abstraction of how Minecraft went from this:
To this:
