Notch reveals plans for Space Sandbox similar to Firefly

Okay fellow Firefly/Serenity fans, just off the bat, the game ISN’T going to be based ON Firefly or Serenity, it’s just going to have a similar feel to the excellent series we know and love.

Notch (the man behind Minecraft) says that he wants the game to be “more like Firefly”. He goes on to say: “I want to run around on my ship and have to put out a fire. Like, oh crap, the cooling system failed, I have to put out the fire here.”

So the game will be futuristic, but it won’t be that perfect “Star Wars” style of futuristic where the ships gleam and fire lazers and everything is better and more awesome than in the present. It will be a rougher type of future where, sure you have a spaceship, but it’s kinda grubby and covered in space-dust and doesn’t have force-fields so if you fly into that meteorite shower you are getting torn to pieces. And while I approve of the former type of future just as much, I think that this whole premise has me excited already (although that might just be my massive man-crush on Notch…).

Now it is, unfortunately, all purely in the planning phase at the moment. Notch says he doesn’t know if this is Mojang’s next big game or not, but the idea is there!

He says he will want to work on it in a similar way to how they worked on Minecraft, starting with the bare bones of the game, slowly adding in more content and slowly adding in more staff working on the game until it becomes awesome and unstoppable.

The game will, theoretically be based on the 1984 trading simulator Elite. Now, that game was out 8 years before I was even born so you’ll excuse me that before I heard about this from Notch, I had never heard of it in my life.

As far as I can make out, you piloted your star-ship (in a first person view) through a massive open world containing a number of galaxies each with hundreds of stars. The objective of the game was to obtain money in order to upgrade your light trading ship which you could do through bounty hunting, trading, piracy, mining and then you slowly made your ship into the most badass around.

There did seem to be combat and there must have been some form of economic infrastructure in order to make sure that the various types of getting money worked and Notch did seem to say it was rather well done.

How it will all play out, I couldn’t possibly say. However, the idea of this trading simulator (which actually reminds a fair amount of Eve: Online as well) combined with a massive randomly generated Minecraft-esque Universe and a Firefly themed look… Well… I’m intrigued!