It appears that Markus Persson aka Notch has started a new studio. There are not much details about it, but the Minecraft creator says he is now working on a game with voxel graphics and roguelike elements.
On April 2, Persson made a brief announcement on social media, sharing the studio’s name, Bitshift Entertainment, and logo. The company has its own account on X, but there is barely any information there at the moment.
Stylized pixelated LCD display look sketch for the splash screen. pic.twitter.com/oU01eerXXW
— notch (@notch) April 2, 2024
Persson currently plans to create a “roguelike (in the old sense. cursed items, ridiculously broken mechanics and so on) combined with a first person dungeon crawler.” But the project doesn’t have the final direction at the moment. Notch previously described it as “Borderlands with D20’s,” also comparing it to Diablo.
Current plan is roguelike (in the old sense. cursed items, ridiculously broken mechanics and so on) combined with a first person dungeon crawler, but we’ll see where this vague direction takes it.
— notch (@notch) April 3, 2024
Some users even assumed that the new game might be a reincarnation of the developer’s pre-Minecraft RPG project Legend of the Chambered. Notch backed it up, but said he came up with the following working title — “Levers and Chests.”
Right now, he is working on the game solo, with a little help of a couple of people on the business side of things. Last month, he also asked if “any world class voxel artists in the LA area looking for work.”
Persson has shared some images over the past several weeks, but since the project is now in very early stages, they are basically prototypes of levels with a lot of placeholders. For example, demons were borrowed from the Voxel Doom mod.
Markus Persson is best known as the original creator of Minecraft. Since Microsoft acquired his studio, Mojang, for $2.5 billion in 2014, he has started several projects, none of which ultimately shipped. In 2015, together with Jakob Porsér he opened studio Rubberbrain, but it never launched a single game.