Bryan Solero
Mike Grant
Ryan Bowley
 What is Minecraft
 About Minecraft
 Meet the Creator
 What went wrong
 What went right
 Looking for Improvement
 Additional Thoughts
 Influence
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghQjR7oL8Mo&feature
=channel
 http://www.minecraft.net/play.jsp
 Minecraft is a sandbox construction game created by
Markus Persson founder of Mojang AB
 Minecraft is currently in beta and available to players
for $20.00
 Markus Alexej Persson :
 At age 7 he started to program on his dad’s Commodore
128
 Made his first game at 8 (a text adventure)
 First worked at king.com as a game developer then
moved over to Jalbum
 During this time he founded the MMORPG Wurm Online
 Outside of work he frequently takes part in competitions
 The Wrong Company Form
 Starting a sole proprietorship for the company
 Meaning that you’re the company
 Keeping the money in the company till the end of the
year
 This meant in Sweden getting high means you pay a lot of tax
 Support
 Replying to all emails gotten
 A lot of support issues also went unnoticed
 This failed by skimming through the subject lines
 Too Much Stress
 Setting up goals would sometimes delay development
speed
 Markus developed fast features while programming but did
not account on potential bugs
 Getting half the entire company sick and working twelve
hours
 Code Reboot
 Deciding on rewriting the entire code base
 The developers got frustrated with the code and decided to
re-write everything
 This ended up being a waste of time
 Missing rewriting features from the old code base
 Some features were lost or have been forgotten like adding
multiplayer
 Waiting Too Long To Add Multiplayer
 As a result of code rewrite the developer did not ported
over the multiplayer code
 Huge features have been written in single player but not
for multiplayer support
 Most of the code lies within the rendering and not the logic
portion
 Letting The Game Fun Itself
 Minecraft was fully self-funded and developed as a free
hobby
 Once having enough money getting a private server and
selling first iteration of the game
 Later on he accepted applications and hired talented
members
 Open Development
 Having people play the game in completely different
ways
 Having IRC channels and forums to discuss on pros and cons
from people who played the game
 Letting the user to be able to mod the game as they see
fit but with certain restrictions
 Not Listening to Advice
 If not listening to advice the creator would never left his
job to start working on Minecraft
 Without the advice the creator would never sold first
iteration of the game for funding
 Making a Game For Myself
 The creator always wanted to make games that are
missing from the market
 Seems people make vauge games general to the public which
don’t turn out so well.
 There are many people out there like yourself that’s easy
to know whether you’re game is appealing
 Not having defined the type of game from the start
 Caused a 6-12 month game to last for over 1.5 years to
reach beta
 No schedule for features
 Caused features to be developed and created randomly
 No restrictions on what is allowed in game or direction
for players
 Can cause players to be turned away from the game
 Markus Persson was very lucky with the development
of his game Minecraft
 The game hit a niche in the market filling in a gap that
was missing
 He developed a game that intrigued him allowing him
to have fun during development
 Game is highly acclaimed by players having sold copies
for pre-final milestones
 Many videos on youtube.com
 Subreddit dedicated to minecraft
http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/