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The development of 0x10c has come and gone from the media spotlight, with sporadic details and screenshots being released with little warning or schedule. Markus Persson, better known by his online pseudonym of Notch, finally talked more about why the game is slow to come to fruition, and admits that 0x10c isn't a fun game yet - but it has the potential to become one.

During the Game Developers Conference this year in San Francisco, Notch revealed that much like Minecraft, 0x10c would feature no-built in mod API for fans to create their own custom content. While this news may upset some fans who were hoping that the creator Minecraft itself would have amended the lack of modification support in his next title, Notch has his own reasoning for not building it in from the ground up:

"I kind of want to turn the modding into actually doing the programming within the game."

For those questioning what he could possibly mean, all of the computer terminals within the name can be programmed using real java language. This means that modding - or more accurately, coding - will require programming knowledge. Still, fans of Minecraft have found ways to create 16-bit processors using just redstone and relays in Minecraft - if any group of fans were going to figure out modding no matter what, chances are it'd be Mojang fans.

The game is also going to be significantly far more complex than its block-based brother, and will apparently be somewhere in the middle ground between the hard to learn, 'losing is fun' mentality of Dwarf Fortress and the accessibility of Minecraft. Seeing as those games seem to be at polar opposites of the difficulty scale, it looks like only time will tell what 0x10c is truly like.

0x10c Notch

Notch also surprised fans by acknowledging that the game may actual never be released - he'd like to see it either become a fun title, or simply be a lesson learned on the trail of game development.

"It depends if it's just going to be me and I'm going to still feel this kind of weird pressure. It's not really pressure, it's just some kind of weird creative block that's been going on for too long, and [0x10c] is going to be put on ice until we can fix that. I'm very excited about the actual game. We have two prototypes going on now. It's not really fun yet, but it feels like it could be fun because there's nothing to do in there yet."

It may seem like a shocking thing to say, but Notch has long said that the revenue stream from Minecraft will be used to support venture opportunities in other games which may never see the light of day. Notch is bringing another developer over to the project,

What do you think, Ranters? Does 0x10c sound like the kind of game you'd want to play, or would you prefer to see Notch focussing his effort elsewhere?

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Source: Polygon