Making Metagun

Nizzotch · 762K views · 2010 · 6:39

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Indie game developmentGame programming & enginesSoftware practice, open source & careersdemo

Why Hacker News recommends it

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.

What it is

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.

Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2010 to 2015.

What Hacker News said

Recommends chops · 2014-08 · on “Notch programming a Doom-like in Dart”

Notch's Ludum Dare video for Metagun ( [this 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 somet

Recommends wallflower · 2015-01 · on “Ask HN: I'm going to present technology jobs to 400 16yo,what should I tell them?”

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 simplif

Cites hjalle · 2010-10 · on “Productivity Tips for Programmers”

So basically, premature optimization sucks. Don't search for a solution of a problem that doesn't exist. If you spend lots of time writing the same code: optimize that. If you dont do that, dont optimize it. I think lots of people belive that its some kind of magic that made Sergey, Larry and all the other successful programmers successful. [this video] <-- There you got productivity by Notch (Minecraft creator for those who dont know). Its like three seconds of twitter, 30 minutes for food and some sleep, for a total of 48h. Actually that makes me take back the idea of the magical thing, since the magic seems to be complete dedication to the task you are supposed to do.

Cites thebigshane · 2012-02 · on “Hackathons are nonsense”

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