> While looking through some project folders, I found an old protype of a game that never quite became anything. Kinda.
> It was called “RubyDung” (for various reasons), and was supposed to be a base building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress
> As the RubyDung engine got more advanced, I started thinking about adding a first person view for following your minions around, kinda like in Dungeon Keeper. It worked ok, but the graphics got very pixellated and distorted, so I left it out.
> But then I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do. I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it flawed. Building was fun, but there wasn’t enough variation, and the big red/blue blocks were pretty horrible. I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well, so I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style, reusing some art and code (although not as much as you’d think) from RubyDung, and came up with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k
Unfortunately, that last YouTube link is not viewable for me ("This video contains content from Nizzotch. It is not available in your country.").
But the conclusion is: Infiniminer was definitely a huge inspiration on Minecraft.
People Make Games made a video about this Infiniminer/Minecraft story and they interviewed Zach Barth. When Microsoft was reviewing the 2.5B Minecraft deal, Zach was working for Microsoft and was on those meetings.
The World of Notch - The origins of Minecraft | https://web.archive.org/web/20160604071857/https://notch.tum...
> While looking through some project folders, I found an old protype of a game that never quite became anything. Kinda.
> It was called “RubyDung” (for various reasons), and was supposed to be a base building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress
> As the RubyDung engine got more advanced, I started thinking about adding a first person view for following your minions around, kinda like in Dungeon Keeper. It worked ok, but the graphics got very pixellated and distorted, so I left it out.
> But then I found Infiniminer. My god, I realized that that was the game I wanted to do. I played it in multiplayer for a while and had a blast, but found it flawed. Building was fun, but there wasn’t enough variation, and the big red/blue blocks were pretty horrible. I thought a fantasy game in that style would work really really well, so I tried to implement a simple first person engine in that style, reusing some art and code (although not as much as you’d think) from RubyDung, and came up with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9t3FREAZ-k
Unfortunately, that last YouTube link is not viewable for me ("This video contains content from Nizzotch. It is not available in your country.").
But the conclusion is: Infiniminer was definitely a huge inspiration on Minecraft.