We’re huge admirers of Markus Persson (notch), and all he has achieved with Minecraft, and his recent BAFTA. Most especially the simple idea of redstone, the possibilities of redstone are mind boggling. Markus Persson said not so long ago that it is now “trendy” to buy indie games.

Notch: “It’s become hip to pay for indie games”

Recently sites such as www.indiegala.com have been popping up allowing people to purchase indie games for a small price, in “bundles” also giving money to charity at the same time. The big publishers are not the only ones that can sell games in large quantities, apps and software. It’s actually been a way of getting people of all orientations to donate to charity, and the hard working programmers at the same time, whilst also choosing a percentage they wish to donate to each.

Yes, a calculator made in minecraft. You can laugh all you want, but if you play the game, you will realise that this is HARD!!

Skip halfway through the video to see how it is made. Ok is this relevant? Well, redstone makes programming fun!! Essentially, it proves that it can be easy (reasonably) to program online, redstone is not really the same as programming, but it shows ordinary people that you can engineer something whilst having fun.  There are several other programs that do this, and android development can be done in a similar way of slotting pieces together, instead of reading through streams of code.

Notch was originally a one man team, then slowly built Mojang, and has now left Minecraft development to start his own projects.

At the time of publishing this over 27,577,424 people have registered and 5,725,220 people bought the game (registered for the free version).

Markus Persson was able to develop minecraft because he had the programming knowledge, and as the game’s popularity grew so did his knowledge and the size of the games capabilities.

Without programming knowledge you can’t always build the things you want, unless you have money to pay someone else. With programming knowledge you can make cool apps for your sites, make plugins for games.

Ok, so not everyone likes programming, but to learn as much as you can is a bonus. You don’t want to waste time having to pay people to solve your problems when you could simply solve them yourself, to understand the tools you are using, even a small amount will help you to make any small changes that you need. If you take a look at current ICT job sites, programmers are among the highest paid, as programming is so specialist, you could not sit at a computer and accidently produce an app. The guy behind GMOD, a similar game which involves physics. Which started from a humble Half Life mod, has also had similar success. If you want to make money online, programming is a great place to start. With programming knowledge you need not be restricted. You can edit templates for your forums, or your homepage.

You can modify your sites functionality. And lots more!! It’s pretty easy to share your creations for android, ios etc..

Lets not mess around, Markus Pearson is RICH!! He tweeted that he now buys anything he wants when he goes to the supermarket, not the cheap brands, oh no, he gets what brands he wants! Because he is NOTCH. Well, we can’t all be notch, but we can learn from him, programming is where the money is.  If you can’t program, don’t worry, start with open source, see how it works, and if you can at least understand the basics, you can save yourself a lot of effort.

Other programmers who have done well for themselves.

Robert Muresan of exosyphen studios
Philip Hindle of FreeStyleGames
Richard Darling of Codemasters
Igor Loboda of Monterosa

Check out www.minecraft.net, www.mojang.com, www.twitter.com/notch

A good article to read

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/05/how-to-get-rich-programming.html

If you want to know more about cool programmers, speak to Stephen Ryan on the forum, he’s met loads of them! Working for Codemasters, BBC, IBM, Microsoft and more.