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[Shabbaman]

With all the people who willingly pay to play Minecraft running around here, I figured the following would be interesting: apparently Notch is working on a new game.

A New Game

Hi, I'm Notch, and this is my new game. It's going to be a space game, and it's quite ambitious!

The game is still extremely early in development, but like we did with Minecraft, we expect to release it early and let the players help me shape the game as it grows.

The cost of the game is still undecided, but it's likely there will be a monthly fee for joining the Multiverse as we are going to emulate all computers and physics even when players aren't logged in. Single player won't have any recurring fees.

Backstory and Setting

In a parallel universe where the space race never ended, space travel was gaining popularity amongst corporations and rich individuals.

In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years.

It's now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy.

Game Features

The game is still very early in development, but here is a list of things we hope to include:

Hard science fiction. Update: GAH, NO! I'm focusing on fun gameplay instead. I still want to get corrected on glaring scientific errors, though.
Lots of engineering.
Fully working computer system.
Space battles against the AI or other players.
Abandoned ships full of loot.
Duct tape!
Seamlessly landing on planets.
Advanced economy system.
Random encounters.
Mining, trading, and looting.
Single and multi player connected via the multiverse.
The Generator and the Computer

Each ship has a generator capable of producing a fixed wattage, and everything you connect to it drains wattage. A cloaking field, for example, might require almost all the power from the generator, forcing you to turn off all computers and dim all lights in order to successfully cloak.

The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish.

Full specifications of the CPU will be released shortly, so the more programatically advanced of you can get a head start.

Plunging starships into black holes, sounds like fun.

[ProPain]

Read that a week ago but it's all so vague that it didnt really excite me.