By Rich Jones, Dec 20, 2011.

The theme music for this post is: Anamanaguchi - Power Supply.

tl;dr: Fun new game. Play it online. Help port it to Android.

Well, there goes my productivity.

I've got a new obsession - legendary game developer Notch has released a new game, Minicraft, and it's awesome.

Minicraft is a 2D version of his cult hit, Minecraft. It was written in less than 48 hours as part of the Ludum Dare games competition. The game's strategy is similar to it's parent, but it also evokes strong memories of Nethack and Dwarf Fortress, and the art is very reminiscent of Pokemon. Oh, and it's super, super fun. (And really hard.) Best of all, you can play it online.

Source

The source is also available, which I have mirrored on GitHub in case anybody wants to play with the source and submit pull requests back.

While playing around with it, I started porting the game to Android. I've managed to get it slightly working, but I hit a wall and don't have the time to keep working on it. The problem is just that Minicraft uses AWT for drawing in a color encoding which Android doesn't have. The controls and the sound need to be redone as well, but that shouldn't be too hard.

Android Port

Still, I think this is worth continuing with, so I've started a fund to get the game ported to Android. There is a serious lack of high quality open source games on Android, so I really hope that this one gets picked up. So, if you want to see this game on the phone, chip in a few bucks! Or, if you think you've got what it takes to port it, give it a shot!

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