Minecraft is arguably one of the most successful indie titles on the market. Originally developed by one man named Notch (Markus Persson), Minecraft later became so well known that it also spawned a Xbox Live Arcade version and a Mobile version (iOS and Android).

Today, Minecraft has amassed a total of 43 million registered users.

More recently we learned that Mojang, the developers of Minecraft, struck a deal with Egmont Publishing to transcend the Minecraft brand into printed form. It won’t be long before we see an annual Minecraft themed magazine or comic book.

Many fans of the series have kept their eyes on Notch, Minecraft’s original creator, to see what he had next in the works. Mojang has been developing Scrolls for some time now, a Magic the Gathering inspired card game with online multiplayer, but that’s old news.

Notch has moved on to a particularly mysterious project called “0x10c.”

What is 0X10C?

We don’t quite know what 0x10c is yet, particularly because Notch and Mojang haven’t given much of an explanation. We do know that it is a space styled, first person shooter and takes place on a personal spaceship. The idea is that players will each have their own spaceship, where things go wrong, and they’ll have to use resource gathering a la Minecraft to fix the ship. There will also be a fully working 16-bit computer that operates the spaceship, and allows players to play games while they wait for in-game tasks to complete.

The 0x10C blog has the following to say about the game’s story:

In a parallel universe, where the space race never ended, space travel was gaining popularity amongst corporations and rich individuals.

In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of 0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for 0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years.

It’s now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy.

The Generator

Each ship has a generator capable of producing a fixed wattage, and everything you connect to it drains wattage. A cloaking field, for example, might require almost all the power from the generator, forcing you to turn off all computers and dim all lights in order to successfully cloak.

The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish.

0x10c Video Test Posted

Notch just posted a video test of the game on October 13, that shows off some of the lighting effects and gameplay elements.

As you can see from the video, there are dynamic lighting effects, particle effects (lasers from the weapon when firing), and some pretty awesome outer space graphics. At one point, you can even see a nearby planet when whoever is playtesting the game looks outside the spaceship via a portal.

You can also see the working 16-bit computer in the video as it is used several times.

Many folks will be pleased to see that the graphics are quite a bit more advanced than those in Minecraft. The background textures and models are clearly a step up from the classic 8-bit graphics of Notch’s first game. If you pay attention, you can even see the soldier from Team Fortress 2 standing perfectly still in the video. We would assume the TF2 model it is just being used as a test object and won’t appear in the actual game.

Notch also posted another entry on the 0x10c blog that the developers will be including multiplayer support natively from the very beginning. Instead of what Mojang did with Minecraft, merging singleplayer and multiplayer servers in a much later update, they will be including multiplayer support from the getgo.

This is fantastic news indeed and naturally shows that 0x10c will be a multiplayer focused game.

No Release Date or Further Details on 0x10c

Since there are no further details on 0x10c we’re not going to speculate on a release date either. The game is still fresh in development, but knowing Mojang, it won’t be long before they release a public alpha version.

Minecraft was originally released unfinished, and the community helped shape the future of the game by paying for it early, and making suggestions for improvements. It is most likely that 0x10c will follow the same kind of social development as Minecraft.

As soon as we know more about the game we’ll let you know!