Dev Diaries: Minecraft Earth #1 – From Idea to AR

This particular game grew out of an idea that was kind of deceived – No, conceived by such passion. As a creative director, co-creative director with Jens, and then it was conversations between Saxs and Jens, it was like out on some sort of long walk

They took in San Francisco several years ago, where they were walking around San Francisco and kind of imagining playing the game and imagining if Minecraft Earth existed. Oh, what would be over here? And what will be built here? And how would we change this particular street corner?

I think it was at MINECON in Boston, that we took the game and we were showing it to Jens and Agnes and other like members of the Stockholm team and we had filled this park in Boston up with adventures and tappables and me and Saxs – who’s the creative director on Redmond side,

We were just walking around that park with his kids, and we had that complete sense of adventure, that we were inside an adventure game, that we were exploring this park, we were exploring this world, then we were encountering all these monsters and having all these adventures

In AR on our phones, and then it felt ready, it felt ready then. I think AR is important in game development, because it’s a new thing and we need to figure out how we use this new tool, this new technology in a way that is fun.

So – and in a way that’s useful, like every, every new technology that we get can show up in games, can show up in other places where it becomes part of your world, but if you look at like science fiction for the last like 40 years,

You can see that augmented reality, virtual reality have a significant place in all kinds of different applications and we are exploring what it means to do augmented reality in games. People often conflate AR and geocaching, because

Geocaching is a game that uses the GPS sensor on your phone to show you a map and makes you walk to places to pick things up, which is a feature in Minecraft Earth. But AR itself is augmented reality that’s overlaying computer graphics on top of like a video,

But once you go into actual augmented reality I think Minecraft Earth is dramatically different. It’s much less about focusing on some one thing, and fighting some one thing with simple gestures. It’s more about being in a fully immersive Minecraft world.

You can do all the things that you know how to do in Minecraft, but you’re fully immersed and you’re moving around the space and your location matters. I like to think that we make better use of augmented reality and make it feel more

Kind of like virtual reality, rather than just overlaying a 3D rendered character on top of a picture. I think that when we started out, we released our first – our very first beta version primarily for builders, right?

We have the build plates, and you go out and you get resources and you build something cool. What we saw in our data from our players is that players love adventures. They love adventures more than they love building. And that’s okay, so they still have building for those who want to do that.

And we are really focused on building out that adventure ecosystem and making it really great for that type of player. We also cater to the player that wants to collect things. In mobile free-to-play games, collection is a very common mechanism that people really enjoy,

So we put together our player journal that just released this spring, so people can see all of the different mobs, blocks and items that are in the game, and they can go out and collect them and learn more about them,

And we’ll continue to expand on the player journal for that type of player in the future. But we do really want to see emergent behavior in both adventures and in building, where people take the blocks that we have and can create new things that we didn’t expect.

In the adventure side we expect people to start playing in different ways, like we have loved seeing the community spring up around adventures and people work together to try to solve them, and to solve them in different ways than we originally anticipated, and that is super cool.

And also we’re looking at what players do and trying to modify where we go next based on that. My favourite part of Minecraft Earth would have to be the adventure crystals themselves, because I like how it ties into the whole game itself, and that I’m able to

Activate a crystal from anywhere, and able to place it in my home and living room. Since we were going to be able to reimagine Minecraft specifically from the ground up for Minecraft Earth, what kind of things could we do that would be curating experiences that would be delightful to the user.

And so born from that were, we started to think about well if I was creating sort of bite-sized puzzles, what would those look like in Minecraft? And that informed on a lot of what we went off and prototyped like what type of scripting could we do?

What kind of limits could we push? Redstone and command blocks and things of that nature. And so, we used that to inform on like, what we wanted to go off and do and that created some really fun results,

Some that actually are still on the cutting room floor and some that made it to the game. I think that people working together makes a lot of sense. Like one of the things that I end up doing a lot, is I won’t go into a rare or epic adventure by myself.

Like I’m comfortable doing the commons and the uncommons alone at home whenever I feel like it but if I want to get into a rare or an epic I’m like hey, hey kids! Hey husband! Come on over and play with me right now because you know, it’s actually hard to do by yourself.

There might be a bunch of mobs and a puzzle that you’re trying to figure out at the same time. I think what makes a great adventure is one that triggers a level of curiosity, be it about the environment that the player’s playing in, or

If there’s a new mob that they’ve seen, or if they have a story-worthy moment where they were hiding behind their couch while they were ducking arrows being shot at them by a skeleton. Just anything that causes the player to have that feeling that the time spent was time rewarded.