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.
