Catacomb & Council

Catacomb Snatch and Crown & Council's Title Screens.
Taken from Catacomb Snatch Wiki and Steam.

Most people know about Scrolls/Caller's Bane & Cobalt as the only non-Minecraft releases from Mojang Studios and I've already tried to cover them in previous "articles". Not only there's also Cobalt WASD, but there's still a few games technically developed and released by Mojang developers. Perhaps they're not large enough for a dedicated post (although I think that can be debatable), I think it would still lead to something pretty neat and interesting.

These January posts were kicked off with Minicraft: a game that Markus "Notch" Persson developed for a game jam in December 2011 when Jens "Jeb" Bergensten already become the lead developer of Minecraft. We're coming full circle as Notch wasn't the only person in Mojang interested in game jams, which resulted in creation of more curious titles. A couple of them are stand out among the rest.

Catacomb Snatch.

Mojang Studios and Humble Bundle collaborated multiple times to create new titles via game jams for charity. It all started with the first Mojam in 2012 that lasted 60 hours, where Mojang were joined by teams from Oxeye Game Studios and Wolfire Games. A poll was used to pick specific genre and theme. In case of Mojang's team, it was a mix of "Real-Time Strategy Shoot 'em Up" & Steampunk-Ancient Egypt". While Catacomb Snatch was initially only available as a part of Humble Bundle Mojam, It was then released for free with source code and soundtrack by Daniel "C418" Rosenfeld and Mattias "anosou" Häggström Gerdt.

Catacomb Snatch is centered around the competition between two treasure hunters. Both single player and multiplayer are available. The goal is to gather fifty batches of treasure from a Trove located in random location within title's map. In order to reach it, player has to build a railway to it. Batches can be carried by carts that also have to be made. You have to kill enemies in order to collect money that can be spend on equipment like bombs and turrets. Items can used not only to gather even more money and overcome catacomb's obstactles, but also expand and defend your positions on the map.

Catacomb Snatch: Maescool's Modification Screenshot. Taken from CatacombSnatch.net.

Similarly to Minicraft, Catacomb Snatch was picked up by community enthusiasts. As of the time of time of writing this post, there's a dedicated website for modified version of the game from Pieter "Maescool" Maes. He was one of many people interested in Catacomb Snatch. After seeing how various people were patching the game on their own, Maescool decided to follow their examples while skipping the "asking for donations" part. His GitHub project gathered a lot of traction and contributions from other people. According to the website, the latest build (#304) was uploaded on October 6, 2019 with last recorded updates for development build were made in the middle of March 2016. Maescool is still around and even respondes to project's issues: in a comment to "Upgrated Gradle", he states that he "was looking to upgrate things couple of months ago, but things came up".

Crown & Council.

This game had its unannounced release on Steam on April 22, 2016 for free. Similarly to Cobalt, Crown & Council went through a long journey before reaching this point. Henrik "carnalizer" Pettersson talked extensively about title's story in an article for Game Developer. While all sources talk about Crown & Council as "a polished up game jam title" (including Steam page), I wasn't able to find public confirmation of it. I assume it was some internal Mojang Studios event, which would make a lot of sense.

In short, carnalizer used this project of his as another attempt to learn programming. His now former colleagues (Pettersson moved over to Resolution Games in 2018) were aware of Henrik's hobby and eagerly provided suggestions and feedback about the game. It even used bits of code from different Mojang Studios' projects. Daniel "Kappische" Kaplan, Mojang Studios' ex-business developer, mentioned the possibility of putting Crown & Council on Steam. All parties involved had nothing against it, including company's stakeholders. Microsoft was on board with this idea too, going through the process of licensing and trademarking the game without major issues.

Crown & Council Screenshot. Taken from Steam.

What you get here is Turn-Based Strategy game inspired by 1995's title Slay and board game by the name of History of the World. You fight against other nations on a tile-based map, taking turns to improve already conquered tiles or attack new ones. More tiles you have, more income you get. Player reaches victory after destroying all competition. Initially Crown & Council included 75 maps and you could get more thanks to good old procedural generation. However, the game was updated at the end of January 2017 with 99 map campaign created by aforemention generator. This update also included several fixes and changes, including replacement of "randomness" element with "attribition" after many strategy players criticized how random affected the calculation of attacking/defending tiles.

Conclusion.

Writing about Mojang Studios' other releases throughout this January felt like a natural choice with all recent changes. While this company is known as "creators of Minecraft", I think it's important to acknowledge that there's more to Mojang than just an iconic sandbox game. They tried their hands at different genres and franchises, encouraging the creativity of their employees and letting them work on personal projects. While these endeavors might've been not nearly as successful as Minecraft, I find this somewhat inspiring.

Initial I thought that the culmination of these Hall Tales posts would be rather bittersweet. Both Minecraft Dungeons & Minecraft Legends create an impression that the current goal of Mojang Studios is to use their most popular IP in order to not only explore different genres with spin-off titles, but also potentially open up two versions of Minecraft to new audiences. Their partnership with Double Eleven and Blackbird Interactive is part of Cobalt's legacy. There's reportedly one more title in the works and who knows what form it will take.

Such term of events would naturally drive you to a conclusion that the days of non-Minecraft releases from Mojang Studios are over: it's all revolves around "the big boy". However, after getting to know all these titles somewhat more in combination with apparent success of Pentiment from Obsidian Entertainment guide me towards different thought. The future for potential totally new projects seems more bright to me, whenever it would be a return of Oxeye Game Studios (with Xbox Game Studios acting as a publisher, in theory) or another passion project of Mojang developers getting into the spotlight.