Minecraft creator only working on smaller games now

While live-streaming a game of Team Fortress 2 recently, Minecraft developer Markus "Notch" Persson confirmed that he had stopped work on his follow-up project, 0x10c. In a post on his blog today, the head of Mojang explained why, and what's next for him.

Persson said that like his previous projects, 0x10c had been an ambitious game. Unlike Minecraft and Wurm Online, the development of 0x10c was being closely followed by a legion of fans.

"People got incredibly excited, and the pressure of suddenly having people care if the game got made or not started zapping the fun out of the project," Persson said. "I spent a lot of time thinking about if I even wanted to make games any more. I guess I could just stop talking about what I do, but that doesn't really come all that natural to me."

Persson's solution was to stop working on 0x10c (which has since been picked up by a group of fans who want to see it through to completion), and to devote his time instead to making smaller games, "not hyping games or trying to sell a lot of copies."

As an example, he pointed to Shambles, a Doom-inspired first-person shooter he cobbled together in a week as part of the 7DFPS game jam. The game drops players into the middle of a zombie apocalypse where the only way to get more ammunition or health is to kill uninfected civilians and soldiers.

"This is what I want to do," Persson said. "I want to do smaller games that can fail. I want to experiment and develop and think and tinker and tweak. So that's what I'm going to do."