This weekend, Mojang, the development team behind the indie hit, Minecraft, will be live streaming the development of their new game.
They will be creating a brand new game in 60 hours. Insane right? Not only that, but you can vote for the game genre and the game theme as well.
To top it all off, they are teaming up with Humble Bundle, everyone's favourite "pay-what-you-want" games retailer, with another pay-what-you-want special. Pay what you want for Mojang's brand new, yet to be decided game, and they will give it to you at the end of the 60 hour development deadline.
All the money will go to charity. How awesome is that?
Not sure I can look at a bunch of guys creating code for 60 hours though...
Check out their video as well as the source link below for more information.
Looks like Microsoft is starting to look after their independent game developers.
A few of the good things that have been announced:
Maximum size limit has been increased to 500MB (up from the previous 150MB limit)
Developers are now able to apply a price point of 80 MS Points ($1) to games smaller than 150MB. Previously, you could only apply the $1 price tag to games smaller than 50MB
Also, the maximum number of titles than can be on the market at any given time, per developer, has been raised to 20, up from the previous 10
So Microsoft is starting to see that independent developers can do a lot for your platform.
There are still some things that Microsoft is neglecting, like access to achievements, but overall I believe it to be a step in the right direction.
Ars Technica has a really awesome feature running on a small 48 hour independent game development competition running at the Queensland University of Technology. Twenty teams, both pro and independent, tackle developing a game based on three keywords.
The keywords for this year: "badger", "key", "suit"
The possibilities are endless.
The next three links cover the trials, the tribulations, the coding, designing and frustrations of all the teams at this event.
Microsoft recently gave the .NET Development world quite a scare by implying that their new development platform is based on HTML5 and Javascript when they unveiled their new Windows 8 Touch interface.
I for one don't believe that Microsoft will be throwing away 10 years of .NET development and experience and that most of the internet are jumping up and down for nothing. I happened upon this Ars Tecnnica piece which posits that, possibly, Windows 8 might just be the best development platform that we've seen yet. I don't believe we'll see the end .NET anytime soon and I also think that Microsoft is on the path to supporting more and more open source technologies.
