Whether you’ve played it or not – and there’s no way you haven’t heard of it – Minecraft is the most successful indie title of all time and arguably the most played title worldwide. The addictive nature of the gameplay, crafting mechanics and dollops of creativity it inspired has made Minecraft famous but game designer and industry veteran Brenda Romero believes its success had more far reaching effects.

“Minecraft was the reboot of the graphics arms race – it literally reset projects,” Romero said in conversation with Games Industry International.

“There were massive projects in the works that got rebooted entirely because of Minecraft. Gameplay matters. What’s happening in the player’s head matters. Minecraft at least in my experience is just shockingly unprecedented.”

It’s also a case of more gamers looking past a game’s visuals in favour of the gameplay. “And players are much more willing to explore things whereas in the past the reaction may have been ‘look at the shitty graphics.’ I feel like we’re past that point.” Thus far, more companies have been “taking lots of smaller bets in the 1-5 million dollar range, which is still a large amount but nothing compared to a AAA title.

“I’m seeing game publishers taking lots of smaller bets, knowing that maybe of these 10 bets one is going to pan out. That’s happening now. People look at things like say, Minecraft, like FTL, and you can potentially have the same return on investment.”

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments below.

This is Part 2 of my game journal for FTL: Faster Than Light. Read Part 1 Here.

One of our crew members is dead and it’s my fault.

This is Faster than Light: Part 2.

Entry 8

It was a routine mission.We’d just bought a transporter to allow us to teleport onto enemy ships. This seemed quite stylish to me so I was eager to try it out.

Naturally, we sent Sem to be the first member of the newly formed boarding party. Who is Sem? He’s a human crew member so valuable to me that I forgot to mention him in my last few journal entries even though he’s been with us for quite some time now. He’s former Federation. We found him at a base and he was eager to join up and kill some rebels. Then I forgot about him for a while.

Poor, poor Sem. We encounter a rebel drone and I had what I thought was an ingenious idea. Drones don’t have a crew, so if I teleported even just one person over there he’d be able to attack the drone’s systems with no trouble. Sem got in the transport and waited to be beamed.

“Sorry I’ve been ignoring you, Sem. I’ll get to know you better when you get back.”

They’d be the last words I’d ever say to him.

I’d gotten too excited about the transporter. I hadn’t thought things through. Sem got to the drone to discover something not shocking at all. The drone didn’t have any air in it. Why should it? It didn’t have a crew. Sem got to the drone and immediately suffocated rather anticlimactically. The transporter has a cooldown time so we couldn’t beam him back. There was nothing we could do but watch him die and apologize profusely.

We ended up taking the drone out pretty easily making the whole mission all the more pointless.

He died to teach us all a valuable lesson about oxygen.

Entry 9

Another of my crew is dead. I’ll miss Sem, but I barely knew him. This one is far more personal.

We tracked a distress beacon in the hopes of collecting a reward for helping someone. It was a trap. A mantis pirate ship was waiting on the other side of the jump. They beamed two of their soldiers aboard the bridge. My wife, Lizzie, was there all alone. They ate her alive.

The med bay was hit by a missile and taken offline. There was never any way to save her. Zerimar was in the med bay trying to make repairs when the mantis ate through the door and found him. They ripped him apart. Another enemy missile slammed into the hull. We had to cut life support to our own ship just to keep the shields and weapons online. Oxygen was running out.

I had to get the mantis off my ship or die trying. I ordered the rest of the crew to follow me to avenge the others. Soda, Zemu, and I attacked the mantis head on in an all-out melee aboard my broken ship.

Soda was the first to die.

The mantis were next.

The mantis ship teleported away. I never got my vengeance for what they did to us.

Xemu and I are the only crew members left, and the ship will fall apart if anything hits it.

At least it can’t get worse, right?

Battered and beaten, we jumped to sector 7.

A lucky store found early on allowed us to repair about half the damage to the ship. We limped through sector 7 just barely.

Entry 10

This is Xemu. The captain is dead. It was horrible.

If anyone gets this message, please send help. I’m not going to last much longer out here.

We finally got to sector 8, home sector of the rebel mother ship. The captain and I must have been crazy to think we could take it on by ourselves.

Things seemed to be going well. We entered sector 8 with the hull in pretty good shape. We were on our way to the mother ship when a rebel fighter cut us off. It was armed to the teeth with shields to match. We’d never faced anything like that before. We just weren’t ready.

I’d never seen so many missiles in one place before. One of the missiles punched a hole through the bridge. I was on the bridge. The oxygen in the room was sucked out and I had to flee. Unless someone got the pilot system back online, we couldn’t dodge or jump out of there. To give us more to worry about, a missile blew out the life support and the rebels teleported two soldiers aboard our ship who attacked the captain in the weapon system.

The captain tried to run. A missile hurled into the room and wounded both rebels. The captain didn’t make it.

I’m currently on the bridge trying to repair the pilot system so I can jump out of here. The two rebel soldiers are still on board. I’m running out of time. I’m going to end this entry now. It’s going to take a miracle to survive this.

Xemu reevaluates his career path.

Zemu never made it. Some say he suffocated as he tried to repair the bridge. Others say the rebels on the ship found and executed him. All that’s known for sure is that the story of the Cowboy met a tragic end among the stars.

RobertGreenStories.com

Captain’s log. Star date 10022012.

I’ve been playing a lot of Faster than Light, but I still suck at it. The rebels have completely destroyed my beloved Federation. I’ve fled on my ship, the Cowboy, named in honor of the 20 Century Dallas Cowboys football team. I’m with my wife, Lizzie, and a man named after our dog, Soda. This will be a long journey through space with the wife. Hopefully someone brought a pack of cards.

We’re trying to stay one step ahead of the rebel fleet as we upgrade our ship and destroy their flagship in Sector 8. As far as I know, my ship and my crew of three are all that’s left of the Federation. The war is essentially over, but we won’t give up. This is a story of uncontrollable fires, screaming in space, and dead loved ones.

This is FTL: Faster than Light.

Entry 1

On the very first jump we encountered a rebel fighter.

Everyone took their battle stations: Lizzie as pilot, me as gunner, and Soda on the shields. We were in a nebula, meaning our sensors didn’t work. We couldn’t even see the inside of our own ship. An electrical storm broke out as lightning bombarded our shields. We targeted and disabled the enemy’s weapon systems with our burst laser and won an easy victory. After a short battle we received a message from their captain: they surrendered and asked for mercy.

We did not grant it.

“No surrender! We’ll grind their bones to make our bread!” -my wife

Entry 2

We found a rebel space station housing military supplies and decided to attack. We defeated the defense drone and raided the station. Inside we found a new weapon called the hull beam. Beams sweep across the ship in a line hitting everything in their path. Hull beams do double the damage to the enemy ships when they hit rooms that aren’t attached to a system.

We’ve begun a highly effective battle tactic that involves shooting at the enemy weapon system with the laser, then following that with a barrage from the hull beam once the shields are down.

Entry 3

An alien has joined the crew. He’s an Engi. He’s weak in combat but has a knack for repairing systems (Engi, Engineer, get it?). We saved his crew from pirates and he asked to come with us. His name is Nathan and he’s been assigned to the engine room. Nathan seems like an odd name for an alien, but I’m sure he’ll prove his worth.

Entry 4

Nathan is dead. He never proved his worth. We found a man living alone in a cave on a barren planet. His mental state was questionable, but I thought we could make a spaceman out of him yet. I was wrong. The crazy man murdered Nathan  before the rest of us put him down.

A few jumps later we encountered another Engi named Zoltan, which is a much better alien name. I prefer him already. We saved him from pirates in an episode very reminiscent of what happened with Nathan. Eerie. In any case, I’m sure Zoltan will prove his worth better than Nathan did.

Entry 5

Stumbled upon an Ion Blast Mark II out in the middle of space. Ion weapons don’t do hull damage but they disable systems. The problem with this weapon is it’s a power hog, requiring three slots of energy to use. I’ll need to upgrade the weapon systems.

Entry 6

Our crew is coming together. A ship of slavers demanded we turn over one of our crew to be a slave. We refused and a fight ensued. After a fairly easy scuffle the slavers surrendered and offered one of their slaves as a peace offering. We accepted. Xemu is a Zoltan, a group of aliens that supply one power to any system they’re standing near. I put him in the engine room and moved Zerimar, our Engi. Zerimar’s new job will be to wait around for something to get blown up and then run over and repair it.

Entry 7

We’ve reached sector 6. It belongs to the mantis, a race of large bugs that excel in close combat. They prefer to board and eat their enemies alive.  They boarded the very back of the ship and started to eat their way to the engine room. Xemu fled immediately, leaving our engines unmanned and defenseless.

What sci fi story would be complete without the man eating but aliens?

The mantis broke into the room and started picking away at the engines, making dodging enemy missiles that much more difficult. If the stupid beasts hadn’t shot a missile into the engine room where their own soldiers were, they’d have done far more damage. In the end we defeated the enemy ship, but the hull is damaged and the engines had to be completely repaired.

Haha. Mantis are dumb.

We limped into the next system right next to a star.  A Mantis Fighter attacked us as both ships burned from the burning star’s heat.

Solar flares lit up the ship as we combated the Mantis Fighter. The hull was in bad shape. Two mantis soldiers transported into the engine room and took it out right after it had been repaired. They stormed the next room and cut off life support to the entire ship. We were losing oxygen, and if it ran out we’d have no way of getting it back unless we somehow got by the mantis and repaired the life support.

A solar flair caused the shield system to burst into flames as the mantis broke into the weapons room and I retreated deeper into the ship. A missile slammed into the sensors and put a hole in the side of the hull, sucking oxygen out of the sensors room and forcing us to put it on lockdown.

Life support was down. Engines were down. Shields were down. Weapons and sensors were failing. The ship was on fire and one more hit would end it all. I opened up the airlocks to vent out what little oxygen was left in order to suffocate the fires throughout the ship. In my panic I forgot to open the weapons room doors to suffocate the intruders, and they continued their rampage. Another solar flare was about to finish us off.

The engines were down and we couldn’t jump out of there without them. I sent Zerimar to sneak by the mantis and repair the engines just enough for us to make a jump. He nearly suffocated, but he succeeded and returned to the medical bay barely alive.

We jump away from the star into the great unknown. The mantis are still aboard and the hull is still extremely vulnerable. If we’re hit by anything harder than a light breeze at the next location, we’re all dead.

 To be continued…