Play the game Notch made in 48 hours

by JC Fletcher on Aug 22nd 2011 3:00PM

This weekend's iteration of the occasional Ludum Dare game-making marathon, in which entrants have 48 hours to create a game from scratch, had a celebrity participant: Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson, who spent the weekend developing a first-person dungeon crawler called Prelude of the Chambered.

If you'd like to see what happens when Notch rushes (in contrast to the still unfinished Minecraft) you can play the game in a browser window. Like, right now. Here's the link. "It takes about 20-30 minutes to beat the game," said Notch, suggesting you might be able to get back to work today. Of course, he immediately followed with "if you die, you need to start over from the beginning," throwing your workday back into question.

Source: Notch

Tags: browser-game, java, ludum-dare, notch, pc, prelude-of-the-chambered

Reader Comments (55)

Cool. I like Wolfenstein 3D mods. Hope they kept Hitler.

@FriedConsole
I'm guessing you haven't even played it yet.

@FriedConsole its not a mod. it was made from scratch

Holy shit, it's like people really can't recognize a joke if you don't add ";) xDDD :DD", "/sarcasm" or something like that.

Stupid question but what button is it to hit play? Enter doesn't work.

@Doctalen Derp it's the Spacebar.

"I love the Power Glove. It's so bad."

Welp, I'm stuck at the dungeons.

Holy Volume level batman. I think I am deaf now. The speakers in my headphones are now inside my brain.

@IronClawt

I had headphones on and nearly jumped out of my chair when i first broke a wall.

Seems like a neat little game.

So how do I open the gate at the beginning???

@Draco

You don't. Look around the room a bit.

Awesome. It only took him 48 hours to make a Windows screensaver.

@Kayonesoft
It's quite enjoyable. But still a windows screensaver.

Made it 14 minutes and got the pistol before my first death. I need health packs!

@vidguy

There are two that I found - little green potions in chests.

I made it 36 minutes, got the swimming ability and got to the temple. But those little shooting guys kept killing me...

@vidguy
There's like 4 potions in the game, each heal 8-10 points of health

Those weird greenish things that shoot blobs at you are the worst. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOTCH

@Asok

I hear he's adding them in Minecraft as SuperCreepers.

(Dear god I hope he isn't reading this. I don't wanna give him any ideas.)

Anyone with any knowledge of coding couldn't help but notice just how terribly inefficient Notch is during that stream.

Of course we all knew this considering there are mods that reduce minecrafts resource needs to about a third of what it normally takes.

@akeso Ok, I think I recall you saying the exact same thing in another article thread and I don't recall you citing any sources to these resoruce reducing mods.

@Ryguy226

Probably because they're widely known and a few of them have even been incorporated into the game itself.

Optimine+Optifog and MCRegion. There's a few that add mip-mapping to speed things up and slightly improve graphics. There's a few for other random things too, but the first 3 were/are the big ones.

Before adding MCRegion support into the game officially the game would save each chunk (16 square cube) as a separate file. This meant that if you had a decent sized world you could have literally thousands of save files in your world folder. After adding MCRegion it stored saves as (don't quote me on this) 256 squares instead of 16, meaning vastly less files being written. This sped up save/load times for maps a bit (reducing lag slightly when loading new areas and starting the game).

Notch makes amazing games, he just doesn't always make amazingly optimized games.

@Ryguy226
Actually it was me who said it in another post. I didn't bother to check the responses because I figured they'd be all flames and I'm not good with trolls. However, I'm a programmer by occupation and Notch's programming is definitely far from top-notch (heh).

@akeso And anyone who actually develops software for a living would realize that the man was designing a game from scratch in 48 hours and probably didn't care too much about optimization or efficiency.

Got the the Crypt, then I died ;-;

I got to The Crypt and died. Pretty cool I guess.

No thanks. Minecraft is a nice diversion but I still don't get the hoopla. Everyone needs something to go bat shit crazy about for no reason sometimes I suppose.

Tried this yesterday, but I got stuck in a room when a door closed behind me.

I thought it was really fun. Look around on Kongregate, at all the flash games on there. Half of those were made over a week, a month, or more. And they aren't even half as fun as this old-school RPG throwback made in 48 hours.

After the Bethesda Quake 3 Challenge and this, it's pretty much official: Notch is the best.

@Mach2 Kongregate and its ilk seem to be the dumping grounds for everyone who had an idea to remake Snake and Tower Defense. The wide majority of the games are crap, but there are a lot of decent ones on there.

There are some decent devs out there too who continue to put out pretty good works. One of my favorites being jmtb02. Most of his works seem to be through ArmorGames now though.

@That One Guy But he didn't. Make a new genre, that is. This is the same genre that InfiniMiner, Dwarf Fortress, Dungeon Keeper and others belong to. Notch just brought it to full 3D.

Only 47 hours to go until we can play it!

@343 Guilty Fart

Is that a joke I don't get? The game is fully finished and playable right this very moment. I played and beat it in about 28 minutes last night without dying. I found 9/12 trinkets.

The title of the article says the game Notch made will be playable in 48 hours, right? :)

@343 Guilty Fart

No, it says play the game he made in 48. In this context 48 hours is connected to "made" as in, "it took him 48 hours to make this, now you can play it!"

@That One Guy

So you mean that's just corn in the poop I stole from his toilet?

I'm stuck in the "ghost room" portion of the Temple...am I looking for something in here or do I need a special item?

@cjshrader Ha, well, looks like I found it. And then died.

@cjshrader

Same here -_-

@cjshrader

yeah screw that ghost boss. takes forever to find him and then you have to lure him back to the box. but i couldn't find my way back and he killed me.

Its not an easy game, but seriously you people shouldn't be having so much trouble with it. You are gamers, after all...

@mguniverse Obviously, you don't know what "gamer" means today. Just as "nerd" and "geek" do not mean what they used to mean.

@NeoZeroo

It's safe to say that commentators of joystiq are gamers.

Though short, this game is...

*sunglasses*

Top Notch

@ColorblindMonk

YEEEAAAHHH!

Seriously, if this what he can do in 2 days I can't wait for the Adventure Update.

I don't understand why Notch keeps getting so much attention. All he did was convert an existing game into a sandbox editior, now he's suddenly referred to a genius in game design.

@saturn118 Infiniminer's code was released 3 days after Notch's first youtube presentation of Minecraft.

The word is "inspired"

@saturn118 True. He had one good idea and the skills to get it out there. Now it's up to the rest of the industry to take the concept and do something great with it. Notch is no John McCarmack, no Sid Meier, no Jeff Minter, no Chris Taylor...

What's with the Notch hate everywhere? I guess he's popular enough now for people to act like they're not jumping on the Minecraft bandwagon, and in return jump on the hater bandwagon.

@Yothe People hate Notch? That's unfortunate, though perhaps unsurprising. It's the internet, everything is hated by someone.

I think Notch seems like a pretty terrific, normal, guy.

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Play the game Notch made in 48 hours

Reader Comments (55)

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:05PM FriedConsole said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:49PM Andrew12h said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 5:39PM Viiral said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 6:35PM Eight Hundred said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:06PM Doctalen said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:08PM Doctalen said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:16PM vidguy said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:17PM QuintonFlynn said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:25PM IronClawt said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 5:57PM NukeAssault said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:25PM Draco said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:27PM vidguy said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:31PM Kayonesoft said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:42PM Kayonesoft said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:32PM vidguy said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:05PM Fallow said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 9:32PM Destati said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:33PM Asok said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:09PM sonicspike41 said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:33PM akeso said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:47PM Ryguy226 said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:15PM sonicspike41 said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:55PM twocows said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 5:48PM JordanRanson said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:36PM Toasted jUiCE said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:43PM TraceurRyuk Part III said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:48PM sammo21 said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 3:55PM Vexorg said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:01PM Mach2 said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:21PM Kayonesoft said

Posted: Aug 23rd 2011 4:05AM Sympo said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:10PM 343 Guilty Fart said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:19PM sonicspike41 said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 9:40PM 343 Guilty Fart said

Posted: Aug 23rd 2011 2:44PM sonicspike41 said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:17PM sonicspike41 said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:23PM cjshrader said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:26PM cjshrader said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:50PM Marco le Polo said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:56PM xkaosu9x said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 4:46PM mguniverse said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 5:12PM NeoZeroo said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 5:27PM FippyX said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 5:53PM ColorblindMonk said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 6:19PM GreenElf said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 6:33PM saturn118 said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 9:35PM Destati said

Posted: Aug 23rd 2011 4:13AM Sympo said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 6:53PM Yothe said

Posted: Aug 22nd 2011 7:47PM Omenege said

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