Major Mojang news dump

Sorry for the lateness and spaminess of this news post. I do not follow the mojang blog closely for some stupid reason. only the Word of Notch. I shall follow both very closely in future. I can only apologize for how far I am going to bump the comment section downwards. --Kizzycocoa
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PAX 2011 Schedule

We have a lot of exciting things happening at the Mojang booth during PAX Prime (booth 6201 on the 6th floor)! Here is a schedule of the big events, but there will be things going on and prize giveaways throughout the day… so stay close!

We will also be having some Twitter contests going on so you can win some amazing prizes, follow @minecraft on Twitter and enable text notifications to your cell phone from the @minecraft account (visit HERE for instructions on how to do this). You'll need to respond very quickly sometimes in order to win! (note: standard text messaging rates will apply)

Trade Show Schedule:

Friday:

1:00-1:50pm Cobalt Challenges – challenge the developers of Cobalt to a duel!
2:00-2:20pm Xperia Play demo – see the Xperia Play in action
3:00-3:30pm Adventure Update Q&A with Notch – learn all about the awesome new update
3:30-4:00pm Adventure Update demo

Saturday:

11:00-11:30am Scrolls Q&A with Jakob
12:00-12:20pm Xperia Play demo – see the Xperia Play in action
1:00-1:30pm Have your photo taken with Notch on our awesome graphic backdrops!
2:00-2:30pm Cobalt developer's Q&A
2:30-3:00pm Cobalt game demo
3:00-3:50pm Cobalt Challenges – challenge the developers of Cobalt to a duel!
4:00-5:00pm Minecraft Costume Contest – show off your best Minecraft costumes and win some great prizes!

Sunday:

11:00-11:50am Cobalt Challenges – challenge the developers of Cobalt to a duel!
1:00-1:20pm Xperia Play demo – see the Xperia Play in action
2:00-3:00pm MinecraftChick's show video recap – come be a part of MCC's recap of the entire show!
5:30pm Griefer Party – come by and take away pieces of Mojang's first booth as souvenirs (we will be tearing away our booth graphics and giving them away!)

Unable to head out to PAX? Stay tuned to the blog and twitter to find out about exciting giveaways for the Minecraft Community!

Pigtales

Something is going on over at pigtales.minecraft.net. We are trying to figure out what these pigs are talking about, can you help us?

(Real story will be revealed Friday 26th)

Show off your game at MineCon

Ahoy there indie game developer!
We would like you to talk about and show your game at MineCon, in the main exhibitor hall for all our visitors. We want our visitors to be able to learn about other indie games during their visit at MineCon and what better way would it be than to let the developers themselves show it off? Do you want to show and tell your game to hardcore gamers?

Submission form
We would love to hear all about it! :)

I remember when my friends and I started up our own game company back in 2008. We thought that as soon as we would release our cool game, everybody would go to our webpage and buy it since it was so cool. Why wouldn't they? We managed to get a trailer out that got some attention on gametrailers.com and also managed to sell the game on Steam. The much wanted and waited super great sales never came. We struggled after the release and managed to do some consultant work to pay the bills.

Luckily I'm (and especially Mojang) in a much better spot right now and we want you to benefit from it.

Introducing Cobalt

Early on, even as we were founding Mojang, we talked about the idea of collaborating with other indie game studios to release more great games. We wanted to find studios who have our philosophy of developing games, which is staying close to the community and treating it as a service. Today we’re announcing our first game developed by a 3rd party: Cobalt by Oxeye Game Studios.

Oxeye was founded by Daniel "thewreck" Brynolf, Pontus "Kinten" Hammarberg and Mojang's very own Jens "jeb" Bergensten. Additionally the music in Cobalt is made by Mattias "Anosou" Häggström, who is also making the music for Scrolls. Since Jeb is already working with Mojang, it was very natural for us to talk to Oxeye first about a collaboration. Actually during the past few months, most part of the Oxeye team have been residents in the Mojang HQ.

The Oxeye team will be joining us at PAX to demo Cobalt at the Mojang booth. Fans will be able to try the game and take on the developers in death match challenges.

Introduction to Cobalt

It's hard to be a metal face. Agent Cobalt has learned as much after finding the Space Exploration Foundation's lost colonization ship The Seed at planet X9CSEC5.5B-blue, Trunkopia. It was once built by a one million strong development team back on Earth, but disappeared merely 30 minutes after its subspace jump. Whatever happened on board during its misadventure, sanity was not invited.

Cobalt is an action game of running, jumping, rolling, shooting, throwing, dancing, hacking, rolling, flying, sliding, climbing, looting, deflecting, racing, piñata-ing, passing, scoring… and even more rolling! Play cooperatively with friends or defeat your enemies in a death match, loot match, race match, or Capture the Plug matches. (Or one of the other game modes, of course!)

The game is initially developed for PC platforms Windows, Mac and Linux. The Windows version will be released first.

The game's map editor will be included with the release, and will be easy to share and find other player's maps. Additionally the game is written mainly in Lua (a script language), which allows for easy modding.

Make sure to keep up with the latest development at playcobalt.com. We're aiming to release Cobalt "this fall".

Say hello to Minecraft – Pocket Edition

Today we are releasing the first version of Minecraft – Pocket Edition. The game will be exclusive to Xperia Play for a limited time and released to other Android devices after that.

The first version (Alpha 0.1) will focus on the creative aspects of Minecraft. We have tried to put in the features that make sense for playing on a mobile device while still keeping the core of the Minecraft experience. You will be able to select blocks on the touchscreen or just scroll through them with the circle and square buttons on the Xperia Play device. The first version also supports multi-player on a local wireless network allowing you to create a world and invite friends to build together. Some of the features in this release include:

Just like the PC/Mac/Linux version of Minecraft we're planning to continue developing the Pocket Edition for a long time with frequent updates. We are eager to hear what the Minecraft community thinks about our new game and what you all want to see in future updates.

Minecraft – Pocket Edition is now available in Android Market (only visible to Xperia Play devices) for $6.99. Get it here!

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Again, I just want to offer my deepest apologies. such large posts will not happen again in the future. promise! --Kizzycocoa

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(Development blog links #1 #2 #3 #4 #5)