Dev Diaries: Minecraft Earth #2 – Building a World in AR

I think that there are different criteria for different types of mobs. For neutral mobs or friendly mobs I think they have to be absolutely delightful, I think that the Moobloom dropping flowers is delightful, the Muddy Pigs swimming in mud and coming up with that little flower on its head is so cute!

I think that’s super important that people feel connected to it, that it’s got that Minecraft aesthetic, and it just feels nice. Then I feel like hostile mobs have to be scary and have to make sense for augmented reality for Minecraft Earth. So,

We’ve got some things up our sleeves that’ll come out some time in the future that make a lot of sense for the game that we have right now, (I can’t talk about them), but you’re gonna love ’em. The first AR experiences that we built when we were prototyping Minecraft Earth

Were much more “arcadey” and they were all like sitting on the ground, and they were big. They were like big structures, they were sitting on the ground, then you’re supposed to walk around them, like you know, eight meters by eight meters. But what we found is that,

That it’s kind of hard to find these spaces. You have to be in a parking lot, which is not a good idea, or a park. But not everybody has a yard, back yard or a park. And the second thing that I discovered when, or we discovered when we

Were building our prototypes is we liked, we had all these trees, and we were like chopping down trees like this and you’re holding your phone up like this. This is pretty uncomfortable! So that’s kind of how we converged on moving our

Gameplay kind of down to the ground, your phone is pointed downward so it doesn’t become this uncomfortable position but but more like this, the way you usually hold your phone, and you’re not pointing the phone at people’s faces.

If people are actually playing this in their homes, how much space does the average person have, and what would it take for us to actually deliver content that’s meaningful but also takes full advantage of that limited space capacity?

We actually had to rethink a lot of what we were initially planning for the outdoor adventures when we started to bring things internally. The worst thing about being a multi-platform game is, you know, every platform’s different. Luckily enough these these platforms are similar enough that it’s not too bad.

It’s not as bad as Minecraft – is on, you know, ten different platforms or more, and so they have a huge job to do, you know, they have to make sure that their game works on Switch and you know Xbox and Playstation and all those. Luckily we

Have Android and iOS and it’s not too bad, the APIs are pretty similar. The mobile space is very different than the traditional game space and that was a lot of our learnings, and continues to be our learnings, as we create Minecraft Earth

And add features to it. But also, we have a huge fan base around the world that plays Minecraft, and we want to also craft an experience that is complementary to that. So one of the things that has always been a big

Component of Minecraft as a whole has been sense of community. And the fact that people share their experiences and their findings and what they’ve done online with their friends, and those are things that we want to reinforce for the

User because we know that those are things that make it sticky and make it personal. Because when my friend or someone I know tells me about something, that is so much more meaningful than if I get that information from some other place. So we don’t want to abandon that

Aspect of things and we really want to encourage players to think about our mobile experience a little bit different than you might think about something like something else you’d see in the market. So all of the things that we have added to Minecraft Earth

Needed to fit into the world of Minecraft in a reasonable way. So for example, we need to have a reason that there could be a Moobloom, even though a Moobloom is sort of an evolution or a take on the Mooshroom.

And it couldn’t be as something that’s outside of the sort of time and space that Minecraft takes place in. How much backstory do you need for a game like Minecraft Earth? Well, we actually thought we needed less, but as we have moved into the game we realized we needed more.

We need to explain who are you? Why are you here? What is this world? Where is the real world? Like we kind of need to answer these questions because now we’re starting to write more challenge text, adventure texts, and kind of quests

Type text and and kind of placing you in different scenarios, and even if you don’t tell the players we as developers need the backstory, so that the things that we tell the players are cohesive. There’s a big story team now at Mojang

Which thinks about the story in Vanilla, thinks about the story in Dungeons, thinks about the story in Minecraft Earth, and any future project that Minecraft – that’s gonna be set in the Minecraft IP, so that these stories all work together.