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Making Metagun

Nizzotch · 762.9K views · 2010-08-23 · 6:39

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Overview

A timelapse of Notch (Markus Persson) making Metagun, a game built from scratch in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 18. It shows the whole coding session sped up.

On Hacker News

HN holds it up as a vivid example of focused game-jam productivity, and it has been used to demystify programming for students and inspire tools for recording coding sessions.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2010–2015

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What people said

wallflower · 2015-01 · Recommendation

First, congratulations! I would demystify the process of creation. Show them your wireframes, your pencil sketches, talk about the business v. creative push and pull. Make it interactive - break them into groups of 2-3 each for 5 min and show them Notch's time-lapse in the background on projector while you have them work on exercises in ideation - what would their game be? what would the levels, characters, and challenges be. They don't have to present - just get them comfortable with the first step of creation - putting it on 'scratch' paper. If you have time, deconstruct Flappy Bird. The scrolling left to right background v. making the bird move. How the object detection is greatly simplified when you have only one coordinate to detect (y-bird and y-pipeTop/y-pipeBottom). How adding gravity to the bird (downward velocity) allows you to fly the bird. "Making Metagun" by Notch [VIDEO] "Creating Prelude of the Chambered" by Notch [LINK]

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chops · 2014-08 · Recommendation

Notch's Ludum Dare video for Metagun ( [VIDEO] ) was inspiration for a series of scripts I now use for clients and my own entertainment purposes (for some loose definition of "entertainment"). It's a series of shell scripts I use that screencap videos of coding and set them to music (so, for example, rendering a 48-hour coding competition to a 5-minute song, or as I more typically do for clients, render the development process down to a few minutes for them to watch in fast-time how their development was done). It's called watchmecode ( [LINK] ) and I just have to do ./make-av-video.sh /path/to/video.mpg /path/to/song.mp3 And it does the rest, and outputs it to "done.mp4" The result is something that looks like this: [LINK] (disclaimer, I've plugged this before on HN: [LINK] )

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thebigshane · 2012-02 · Reference

Watching `notch` live-code is also very popular. [1]: [VIDEO] Making Metagun [2]: [LINK] Making MiniCraft [3]: [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Nizzotch, played through YouTube.

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