Minecraft Dungeons Diaries: Gameplay

Game design is sort of the development discipline that deals with what you do in the game, how you interact with the game, and then how that changes or kind of manifests over time. Good gameplay in a video game is hopefully how the player

Interacts with the world and an expected, or hopefully unexpectedly weird and funny reaction comes back from the world so it’s all a matter of the feedback between the player and the world and that being satisfying and fun and rewarding enough Whether something is fun gameplay or not is naturally very individual,

So the only thing that we as game designers can do to sort of support the idea of fun, is first of all make sure that it feels true to us. It is very important to cater for all types of player styles and how different players

Will interact with the game, so even if it’s single-player or multiplayer or if we’re talking about a player that loves to explore, or a player that just prefers to run very fast through everything, we try to have all these play styles in mind,

And try to have a little bit for everyone so everyone can enjoy it. Minecraft Dungeons can be played either by yourself, or online with friends or couch co-op. To me, couch co-op is one of the most fun ways of playing Minecraft Dungeons,

Because you’re kind of encouraged to stay in one area, cooperate, play together, and while on the sofa you also get to have this dialogue, “do we go this way? Do we go that way? Or should we do this?” From the original Minecraft we’ve

Been trying to take a lot of the core styles of the character and the mood, so the way we’ve tried to tackle long term progression in Minecraft Dungeons is by giving you year that becomes better the more you progress.

There are three main things that you find as you play through a mission. You have emeralds which is a purely in-game currency for buying things with the vendors in the lobby. And then you have consumables, there are things like food

That you eat to heal yourself, or TNT that you can throw to attack mobs. And then there’s more permanent things like weapons or armor or artifacts and that’s what you’re after as you play through a mission.

The equipment in Minecraft Dungeons has enchantments, as well on top of it, so that means that the player is allowed to choose the equipment itself, and then choose how they want to change it in order to serve the play style they like the most.

We have equipment that allows you to spawn fire or that allows you to shoot multiple arrows at once and that means that you can have play styles that work with you and that you think are fun for the way you want to play the game.

In Dungeons when we talk about our missions being procedural, what we mean is that we stitch the levels together from a set of what we call tiles, essentially rooms that are randomly placed after one another and some of those will be fixed, kind of marking a story beat, and those that belong to

Branches or side paths, they’ll be a lot more randomized every time you play a mission. It gives the player a new way to experience the level every time they play it. So there will be, sort of, things that you are familiar with that you’ll,

You know, recognize from other playthroughs, but the whole, the level as a whole, will be different every time so it’s basically about making sure that you have something that you can enjoy playing over and over again. We want to keep building on Minecraft Dungeons, and I’m very much hoping that players will

See that, and feel that, and that as we iterate on the game over time that those changes and additions that we make will be meaningful.