Nostalgia for Minecraft Indev

Minecraft is one of my favourite games and most favourite game development process. I feel very lucky to have gotten to see how the game evolved from its rudimentary beginnings into the hugely successful household name it is today. When I discovered the game, sometime late 2010, the in development version, Indev, had yet to implement what is now one of Minecraft's defining features; the infinite block world. Like all nostalgia I sometimes look back on that period of development fondly and wonder how things would have turned out if different choices were made.

Computer Issues

It's Friday and I have not done much programming this week. I have been busy fixing my computer. My attempt to dual-boot Windows and Linux went awry when resizing the Windows hard drive partition corrupted the Windows side of it. Lost all the files on the hard drive, thankfully I keep most of my files on Dropbox :) Tried to recover the installation of Windows 7 but restore from factory settings did not succeed. In the end I got enough of Windows 7 working to be able to download and install Windows 10. Will have to see how well it works as I re-install my preferred programs.

Did do a little bit of programming recently. Been exploring procedural demographics. I'd like to be able to populate a virtual village with NPCs who all have family connections, parents and children. It would be great to have a comfy village simulator like Banished with more detailed AI agents and less of a focus on carefully balancing resources to survive.

Ludum Dare 34 Post Mortem

Early December I posted about the 34th Ludum Dare and my desire to compete in it Here

While I did take part I did not succeed in producing a finished game out of it :/ Probably due to attempting a 3D game having never done one before and exhausting myself before deciding on the gameplay fundamentals.

Since then I have had a good Christmas break and had a poke around at the concepts that I didn't manage to suss out back then. Even though I didn't have a completed game to show for my efforts I don't feel they were in vain. Details below the fold...

New Years Resolution

So in terms of creating posts on this blog 2015 was a pretty good year. Almost managed to have a post every month. I want 2016 to be a continuation of the trend of posting more frequently. Ideally reaching weekly posts.

To that end I'll be attempting to have a post written up each week to post on Friday, falling back to short, text only posts like this one if I don't have a full programming project to show off. A post will always have an image so I can at least show off some of the many, many projects which don't get a proper post with cleaned up versions.

The header image for this post is from a rather neat isometric render of a blocky, Minecraft-like map generator. I do like my map generators :3