Minecraft's authentication services went down today. I went to check Mojang's blog to see if there was any information, and i came across this instead:

Yes, i missed the deadline by like five days. I was at a family event all weekend ...

Being self-taught, i don't know much about security or encryption or things like that. But i am considering this to be that one last push that finally convinced me to get into things like this.

I want the game to have some sort of multi-player capabilities. I honestly have no idea how i am going to implement this, but i know that it will be some sort of hybrid between single- and multi-player (maybe another player controlling a boss or something) and i want it to integrate seamlessly with the single-player story mode. (Speaking of that, there will be permanent, story-altering consequenses for dying.) I'm going to need some way of securing connections and even downloads of the game, but i won't get into that for a while.

I'm going to be switching to a Linux-based operating system for my application development. I am considering something popular like Ubuntu, but after a very small amount of research i think i am going to try and make Tails work. Don't worry, i will be cross-compiling once the whole thing is written, so it will be available for Windows, OSX, and other Unix systems as well.