EPIC Minecraft Dungeons Environments REVEALED!

A game environment is what we refer to as the actual world that you walk around in. You can also call it levels, which it is, but we refer to it as environment as that word encompasses more than just the gameplay but also the

Look and feel, and the story that we’re trying to convey. So, the entire point of a game environment is basically to bring out all the gameplay aspects of the game itself, so if you have an environment that has a lot of verticality in itself,

Then maybe you have enemies that can shoot down at you from the high points, and that will sort of create strategies and force players to think in a different way. The environments that you will encounter in Dungeons will be very

Familiar. They are set in the Minecraft universe, but with this game we’re trying to follow a plotline. And for that, all the levels and all the environments that you see in the game are there to accentuate or tell a story that follows the plotline.

The desert temple traps, a good example is that there’s a lot of stories about pyramids where there were a lot of traps present in the Pharaohs’ tombs, and I pull a lot of inspiration from previous games I’ve played, from

Other genres as well and thought alright, so if we’re going to make this in a top-down game, how will we make that? How would that fit into the game? In general, in level design, I think it’s important to create areas that differentiate between each other it helps to distinguish one area from

Another. So if you play a game and every room looks the same, then you are going to get lost no matter how many times you play that level. But if every place looks different, if there’s different lighting, if there’s different size of the

Rooms, if there’s just different shapes everywhere, then you will instantly know where you are when you go back there. We have multiplayer, and it is very much designed as a multiplayer game, but you should also be able to enjoy it even

Though you’re just playing by yourself. And that is a great challenge when it comes to both designing the game, but also designing, in this case, the environments or the levels. It’s absolutely difficult to design things for single player versus multiplayer, because you have to take

Balancing into account, you have to take into account the players who’ll just run around and run in two different directions, so you have to sort of focus their target and make sure that everyone has the same goal in mind.

What makes a good Dungeons level, in particular a Minecraft Dungeon level, is a level or an environment where you can jump in and play on multiple occasions, and you get a new experience every time. The levels in Minecraft dungeons are to some extent procedurally generated. The way that we’ve married procedural generation with

Rewarding gameplay is to design sort of like puzzle pieces, that we then can tell the engine to arrange for us either in a way that we specifically tell it to do, or in a way that is more random. What procedural generation doesn’t take into

Account is pacing, what kind of encounters you will have, how the level will play in general. So you have to sort of strike a good mix between procedural generation and handcrafted content. And I think that we felt that it was important to have these handcrafted

Areas, where you could run around and everything had a certain pacing, but then we could string them together using procedural generation so that it actually behaves differently every time you play. With Minecraft Dungeons, we want

Every level to stand out, and to be able to stand on their own, so just by looking at a screenshot you should easily identify where in the in the world you are, which level you are in, and hopefully also what part of the plot that you’re in.

My favourite part about developing environments for Minecraft Dungeons is that I’m a big fan of Minecraft, and I get to play in a Minecraft universe every day, and create new things. When the game releases I think I’m going to watch Let’s Plays and just enjoy watching people play the game and see

Them interact with the world that we’ve created.