Humble Bundle Mojam
Mojang are teaming up with HumbleBundle.com this weekend, to create a new game with all the money going to charity!
Starting Friday, February 17th, and continuing through the weekend, the team will be livestreaming their progress while they create this game.. follow @Mojangteam and @notch for updates.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8MhLvjoBTs]
By donating, you will get the game produced during the weekend.. and will be some fun and silly incentives for reaching certain levels of donations, as well as giveaways and Q&As with the team.
That’s not all.. Mojang want fans to help choose the theme and genre of the game, by voting on their website here. the highest and lowest voted from each category will be combined for the game!
New Minecraft Map Format – Anvil
Mojang have developed a new map format for Minecraft, dubbed “Anvil”.
This new format increases maximum build height to 256 from 128, and added scope for many more block types by increasing block IDs to 4096, from 256, as well as a number of other changes to prepare for modding and improved compression.
The next snapshot, and Minecraft 1.2 will automatically convert worlds to the new format. You do not need to convert them yourself.
More information is available here.
Double Fine Adventure
Last night, Tim Schafer announced that Double Fine and 2 Player Productions were to use Kickstarter to fund an adventure game and documentary.
Kickstarter is a funding platform allowing people to pledge money to support a creative project; money exchanges hands once the goal is reached. You can back the Double Fine Adventure here. While the creative owner retains all rights to the project, those supporting it can earn bonuses and rewards.. with larger pledges achieving better rewards. Double Fine set up some extra rewards for “premium” pledges.. you can check those out here.
Within two hours, pledges had reached $200k, and before the night was up, it had passed the $400k goal, with more than ten thousand people having pledged to support it! Update: The project reached 1 million dollars in funding within 24 hours, and is currently just over $1,500,000!
Tim Schafer has also recently announced that he’d like to make Psychonauts 2.. with Notch offering to back it. The two have been talking about it, but as yet that’s all.
Minecraft 1.1 is out!
Mojang have just released the latest update for Minecraft, bringing us up to Minecraft 1.1!
This update adds new features and makes a few tweaks to existing features, as well as the usual bug fixes.
Amongst the new features are bow enchantments, new recipes for golden apples, language settings, world type options, and for creative mode, spawn eggs. Tweaks have been made to the biome generator too, meaning smoother transitions between different biomes.. beaches, smoother hills and so on.
Spawn eggs come in different colours to represent different mobs and villagers, and by placing one as you would any other block, this allows you to place mobs and villagers into your world. Note that you will need to be on a mode other than ‘Peaceful’ for the hostile mobs to appear.
