Vu and Lydia taking it away!

Last weekend (4-5 july) we attended Minecon in London with a 10 computer booth running Cobalt. It was an amazing weekend which superseded our expectations in all ways imaginable. Here is just a small sample of what was going on:

Being handed your Mojang badge is like being handed the holy grail. With great power....

Booth looks bloody stellar. Jeb approves I think...

How do you install a game on a hard drive with 1 gb free space on it...

No worries. Multiplay changed out the computers and now we are rolling!

Crowd did all count down from 10 in unison.

Booth filled up quickly and now the focus was on making sure everybody had the best time that we could give them.

No crashes so far!

I present to you: Aconitin! One of our amazing volunteer agents and a force of nature within the Cobalt community.

People of all ages were playing. The most fun was to walk up to a parent who wasn't playing and just hand them a controller. No excuses! Everyone plays!

I present to you: Isogash! Another of our amazing volunteer agents. A pillar of our Cobalt community

I present to you: Janeator! The last of our amazing volunteer agents, without which Cobalt would have about 99% less maps!

The duel between jeb and tommo drew a crowd. Jeb won this one.

Panel was very interesting! I mean, we went from facts about development, to smashing people on stage to finally thewreck getting owned by burntcustard!

We had a special tournament where you could challenge one of the agents, AKA "the pros", no mercy. If you won you got the game for free!

Aconitin, one of our pro players, is setting up for a challenge. He was throughout minecon, undefeated.

Parents were not left out of the fun.

Discussing those pro-tactics™

We did not have to tell people to check out the tutorial. The booth pretty much ran itself for most of the time!

Smiles were seen all around!

Only two would beat the pros during the two days!

Thank you for an amazing Minecon!

Photographers: Ebba Kierkegaard, Daniel Brynolf

Also! Some videos…

The change in ownership of Mojang does not affect this partnership. Our deal still stands.
At Oxeye we’re always optimists. We hope and believe that Microsoft sees and understands all the good things that Mojang and Minecraft stands for, that they understand the importance of the awesome community that has gathered around Minecraft and Mojang and sees what aspects of the brand and the company that are essential for it to continue to thrive: Open, honest communication and free reigns for the developers.

To Notch: We hope that this deal will help you get some peace of mind and that it will help you find your creative spark again. It’s probably always been there but we understand that the amount of attention you’ve gained since the start of Minecraft can act as a major mind-blocker!
Everything we do in life affect our surroundings and our fellow human beings. With your creation you’ve helped MILLIONS of kids and adults choose creativity and innovation over sometimes mindless entertainment. That is going to have an impact on our society for a long time to come.
Be proud of that! Go forth and prosper!

Peace!

The version used at Minecon was v116 ALPHA, and is not yet available for download. Among other things, it featured a new game mode called Challenge. In Challenge, you focus on doing things as fast as possible, like getting from point A to B. Today we created more maps for the mode. Here is a sneak preview:

We have also added local high score lists with epic voice acting feedback by Kinten to all relevant game modes:

Huge thanks to all the volunteers during Minecon that made it all possible!

Thats it for today!

Good night!

/thewreck

Oxeye just attended No More Sweden and made two small games! No more sweden usually offers words to base your game around and we got Evolution, Simulation and One Button Game. You can see screenshots of Cells and EvoBeats and what we are up to now in the gallery down below!

Hanging out with fellow game developers is usually a fantastic experience and this was no exception! To everyone that attended that we did not get a chance to talk to but that still want to discuss something, just send us an email at info@oxeyegames.com

This week me (thewreck), Kinten, Tommo visiting from Italy, and Frall will be working on Cobalt out of a yellow house in the south of Sweden. Kinten found an old AM radio and is now in the process of making a long range antenna so that we can listen to some Italian radio. Mollstam from Mojang has joined us as well and has taken it upon himself to head the cinnamon bun department to the pleasure of us all. I am investigating camera placement for the outdoor map theme in the Cobalt map editor since that needs to be addressed before an update can be released. Frall is working on maps and experimenting with the new tiles that have been implemented over the past week. Tommo is working on the OSX and Linux port of the engine. Check out the gallery below for some on location photos!

As some of you may know, many in Mojang and the whole lot of them Oxeye went to GDC/IGF this year. For me (thewreck) it was mostly to visit enchanting San Francisco and meet (hug) other developers, while for others – like notch who had speaking obligations – things were a bit less casual. Even while engorging myself in all the casual fun I managed to fit a bunch of work on Cobalt, alas I managed to catch the flu and was knocked out for the better part of the weekend following gdc.

After the gdc, me, kinten and another friend moved our cobalt development operations to an apartment in San Francisco for two weeks. Armed with our laptops we went exploring the breakfast offerings during the morning

the office cafés during the day

the night life during the night

and the sights during the weekends.

We managed to snap a lot of reference photos and recorded a bunch of sounds for the future. In regards to direct Cobalt development, I worked mostly on improvements to the editor, which is why many of the changes we have made will not be appearing in the v103 change-log. For example, the tiles browser has been remade, now supporting selecting multiple tiles (randomly picking between them after each placement) as well as rather advanced free text filtering.

The last week in USA, we went on a road trip along highway 1, through Santa Cruz, San Diego, through the Mojave desert to Los Angeles and finally flew home from Las Vegas proudly sporting my minecraft t-shirt. Now, it is time to get v103 ready for upload. We have no current estimate, but our current goal is to simply wrap it up, test it, and upload it.

Some of you have had problems with your Mojang accounts, but we don’t have access to the account or billing systems so we are unfortunately not able to help you. If you have a problem with your Mojang account, gift codes or billing, please use Mojang’s support system here: http://help.mojang.com, or send them an email here: http://help.mojang.com/customer/portal/emails/new

However, if you have a problem with Cobalt itself, such as installing, starting the game or have another game-related question, feel free to contact us on the Cobalt GetSatisfaction page, or get help from the community at the Cobalt forums!

Cheers!