A while back Notch announced his new game, enigmatically titled 0x10c.  Now we get a chance to see what this new space game looks like, since Notch released the first screenshot yesterday via Twitter.  You'll notice an advanced lighting system as well as figures that look a lot less blocky.  

Searching through the screenshot folder you can see the progression of this work on lighting, which started with little more than a room and a few basic shapes.  Just a few moments ago he added in another screenshot, this time showing of the lighting and how it affects complex textures.

Notch is making this another open project, and has plenty of information on the game's site as to what he's actually building:  A game set far in the future of an alternate timeline when the space race didn't end.  When intrepid travelers are put into deep sleep in 1988, a bug in the computer's programming keeps them from waking up until the entirety of civilization is dead.  The game's name is a short hand version of the number of years the computer -- or DCPU-16 -- had them sleep.  

What would you do if you awoke in the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD?  Try to survive of course, and that entails lots of exploration, scavenging, engineering using what you find, and battling other players that would keep you from succeeding in said survival scheme. Thus Notch is planning a game that incorporates all these activities, and he's also building a 16-bit computer within the game itself.  I'd say that he has a massive case of world builder's disease, but as we've seen with Minecraft, he's able to use his illness to great success.  Personally, I am NOT looking forward to Space Creepers.

[via Notch]

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