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Indie developer Mojang has certainly been working hard this year, and doesn't seem to be stopping to take a breath any time soon. Card-based Scrolls is moving full speed ahead despite earlier trademark issuesCobalt, a collaboration between Mojang and Oxeye Game Studio, is currently in beta; and fan favorite Minecraft continues to push sales for PC and Xbox Live Arcade. Even with everything on his plate, founder Markus 'Notch' Persson has been spending plenty of time pushing his latest space-based project, 0x10c.

The Firefly-inspired space adventure game was first announced in April, and seems to have come a long way since then, as seen in a revealing video Markus recently posted to YouTube. While fairly basic in nature, the gameplay video shows off some basic mechanics, graphical capabilities, and the DCPU-16 - a virtual 16-bit computer built into the player's ship, which can be hard modded and re-programmed at will.

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It certainly looks like 0x10c has the potential to be as creative and fun as Minecraft, while also being unique, drawing inspiration from several sources of nerd culture, as it were. Notch has done this a few times before, such as using the "Standard Galactic Alphabet" from id Software's Commander Keen series as the basis for Minecraft's enchantment system. In the case of 0x10c, a virtual 16-bit computer resembling early Commodore home PCs is visible throughout the gameplay video; and the angled, slightly claustrophobic architecture harkens back to early FPS titles like Doom and Unreal Tournament. In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Notch laid out the groundwork for what we may see in the final version of the game:

"The goal is to have it feel a bit like Firefly. You can try to land on a planet but you mess up and, instead of having the ship just explode like it would in real life, the landing gear gets broken. Then you have to try to fix that by finding resources. Instead of the adventure being flying from here to here, it's: I set the destination, oh god I hit a small asteroid and the cloaking device broke. I think they really nailed that kind of emergent aspect in [Faster Than Light]."

As always, the team is open for suggestions, and fans are in no short supply, with constant discussions and debates as to the final product on the official forum, and on social media websites such as Reddit. (My suggestion: Cylon battleships.) So how about it, Ranters: are you in on the hype, or simply waiting to see what eventually comes out of Mojang's idea factory? Regardless of how engaging the game may or may not look right now, it's safe to say lightning could very well strike twice for the well-known indie developer.

0x10c currently has no release date, but is currently in development by Mojang AB.

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Source: Destructoid