Nizzotch
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2013–2022
3:02 · 11M views · May 13, 2009
An early 2009 tech test by Notch of an Infiniminer-style cave game running about 700 fps on a 256x256x64 tile map. It is the prototype that grew into Minecraft.
HN links it as a historical artifact showing what Minecraft looked like at its very beginning.
3 comments from Hacker News
Edit: I just wanted to preface this by saying I think this is a very cool demonstration and a great first step towards a game: I should've made that clearer in the rest of my comment which continues below. The state of the demo is about where Notch was about this time in 2009: this video I point that out because every month or so someone creates a "voxel"-based terrain generator with basic building and gets branded a "Minecraft clone", as if that's all there is to one of the most abnormally successful indie games of all time. Unfortunately, it takes a lot more than that just that to make something that's actually fun to play and is comparable to even Minecraft in its pre-alpha incarnations. And if his success wasn't enough, Notch was comparatively fast at developing Minecraft (at least initially). Within a couple of weeks of the video I linked above, he had water and multiplayer working[1]. Nevertheless, it still took another 2.5 years to get to a 1.0 product, and Mojang is still hacking away at it. Skycraft, on the other hand, doesn't appear to have changed at all since it was last featured on HN[1] two weeks ago. I don't mean to be a negative Nancy about it: I think it's great to mess around with this stuff and if playing around with a basic Minecraft/Lego-esque builder scratches a gamedev itch for you, that's awesome. But it seems really premature to start asking for money for it[2], even as a "Kickstarter"-type pledge drive: I'm not sure I'd even consider this a MVP or proof
Straight from the horse's mouth: The World of Notch - The origins of Minecraft | [LINK] > While looking through some project folders, I found an old protype of a game that never quite became anything. Kinda. > It was called “RubyDung” (for various reasons), and was supposed to be a base building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress > As the RubyDung engine got more advanced, I started thinking about adding a first person view for following your minions around, kinda like in Dungeon Keeper. It worked ok, but the graphics got very pixellated and distorted, so I left it out. > But then I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do. I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it flawed. Building was fun, but there wasn’t enough variation, and the big red/blue blocks were pretty horrible. I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well, so I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style, reusing some art and code (although not as much as you’d think) from RubyDung, and came up with this: this video Unfortunately, that last YouTube link is not viewable for me ("This video contains content from Nizzotch. It is not available in your country."). But the conclusion is: Infiniminer was definitely a huge inspiration on Minecraft.
Notch described what later became Minecraft in a 2009 youtube, calling it an 'Infiniminer clone' he was working on this video