Hidden Resilience of Minicraft

Minicraft's Title Screen. Taken from Minecraft Wiki.

You probably wasted some of your free time on at least one browser game. They're a good option whenever you're just too lazy to boot up a proper game or don't really have alternative since you're young and there's only one family computer or something along those lines. From Flash games on random websites to platforms like Newgrounds, there're many options to check out both old & new browser games to see what this side of industry has to offer nowadays.

This time, I would like to focus on one small game I initially stumbled upon in my spare time many years ago. While I didn't get far into it, this little game has a lot going on for it and you see it first hand after a little digging.

Small & Alone.

Even during the development of Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson was still interested in redirecting his attention to other smaller projects. That includes participating in Ludum Dare: a 48-72 hour game jam competition for developers that's been running every year since April 2002. Notch participated in it around four times with his latest entry for Ludum Dare №22 being a title called Minicraft. As you might've guessed, it's pretty similar to Minecraft. You know, like the game was ported on a platform that just can't handle the "big title" as is. I like this stuff.

What we have here is a 2D action game with survival elements in top-down perspective. Unlike Minecraft though, Minicraft has an actual narrative and definitive end goal. Theme of aforementioned Ludum Dare №22 was the word "Alone". Description of the game establishes everything you need to know: it's about "making sure you'll be alone forever". Player is one of two sentient beings in the world of Minicraft with other one being someone known as Air Wizard. To beat the game, you must kill him:

"The goal of the game is to kill the only other sentient being in the world, making sure you'll be alone forever."

Forest of the Surface Screenshot. Taken from Minecraft Wiki.

To achieve this relatable goal of staying alone, you would have to fight four variations of slimes & zombies (green, red, white and black) across five different levels. You start on the surface of the world, which contains five different biomes. Next three levels are different types of caves you would have to explore in order to go through familiar order of resource in order to make your way to the stairs into the sky where Air Wizard resides.

There's more to this game though, similarly to Minecraft. Besides punching trees (just tree) and mining, you can do some farm some wheat and make bread using an oven. You can also plant trees, cactuses and gather flowers. Workbences are for making furniture and wood/rock tools. Furnace helps you with iron, gold and glass. You will need an anvil for iron, gold and gem tools. There's no armor, but instead you get Power Glove from Prelude of the Chambered and lantern. What's cool about the latter is that you can not only place it, but carry around to light up your way.

Echoes of the Tale.

Minicraft never got any official updates from Notch, but he was still interested in the concept. For some period of time, he worked on a sequel that would later be known as Minitale. It was meant as more of a rogue with various improvements and new features. Unfortunately, nothing came out of it and Minitale faded into obscurity as Notch redirected his attention to other development projects.

However, that didn't mean the end for original Minicraft. Its source code was released in line with Ludum Dare's rules about this stuff, but not under any licence. You can still find it on GitHub. Official pages for Minicraft from both Notch & Ludum Dare are no longer available. I don't remember where exactly I played the web version of the game and my experience was limited to just punching some tress as I didn't knew what I was doing.

Community picked up the touch. Minicraft managed to attract a loyal audience. You can download the recompiled client of the original game from speedrun.com, but it doesn't stop there. There're multiple "community editions" of Minicraft that tried to add something new to it or change things up here and there. The most notable example of this is Minicraft Plus and you can learn about it from its own website. To be short, this is basically the closest thing we have to Minitale: an expanded version of Minicraft with lots of new features.

Interestingly enough, there're some similarities between Minicraft and Minecraft with the most apparent example being the sky level... Well, for those in the know. Sky dimention was the intended third dimension for Minecraft that was later turned into The End.