Tag Archives: minecraft

Upcoming Minecraft Mod API

Considering the humble beginnings of Minecraft, it is no surprise that it does not have mod support. Not to mention who ever knew that there was a desire for it. Without any official mod support, mods for Minecraft have been hacked into the game and eventually communities built up around modding the game. These communities have done their best to build their own mod API but without official support they can only go so far. The community has been begging for some official support for sometime. This is why, when Notch announced plans for the upcoming Minecraft mod API nearly a year ago, the community rejoiced.

Having official mod support for Minecraft will undoubtedly be huge for the community. This will help bring the mod community together. Another huge benefit is that it will enable players to more easily obtain and install mods. Additionally, there will likely be much higher quality mods developed. This is probably only scratching the surface on what benefits we’ll see from an official mod API. However, some of the given information does potentially have some downsides – mainly accessibility.

In order to gain access to this mod API you must signup as a mod developer. It also sounds like mods will go through some submitting process and once accepted will become available to everyone online. If this is the case then there is little place for casual mods. I do hope that Mojang has considered this and provide means for players to easily and casually create mods as well as be able to share with just friends or the entire community.

Since the mod API announcement, Notch has given lead to Jens Bergensten who is continuing to focus efforts on developing this mod API. More recently Mojang absorbed Bukkit, a Minecraft mod team, to help with the mod API. This really shows Mojang’s continued committed to this mod API – not to mention how much this team will help bridge between development and the community.

Back when Bergensten took over Minecraft lead, he had an interview with Gamasutra and from it there is a quote of resounding truth.

“there is no way in hell I will be able to add as much content as the whole internet can” - Jens Bergensten

This quote has stuck with me since I read it and undoubtedly helped set the course for our recently announced sandbox game.

Sandbox Modding

My last post I introduced this idea of building a sandbox game that is mod friendly. What does this “mod friendly” actually mean? Isn’t decompiling the game’s executable and editing the source code considered as supporting mods? Not quite. Decompiling is obviously a way to mod games, as Minecraft and Terraria have proven, but it is still far from being truly mod friendly. To be fair, these games were built by very small teams (1 and 2 people respectively) and being mod friendly can be a lofty goal. To me, mod friendly means to make creating, sharing, and managing mods as simple as possible for the average player.

Creating mods will be simple and fast but still provide much flexibility for those with big plans. Tools will be provided to help perform the more basic tasks such as setting up a mod. Adding content will be as simple as creating a new file, typing in a few lines, saving the file, and then loading it up in the game. No compiling will be required. One goal I have is to make it possible to reload content in game to help streamline the creation process. No restarting necessary!

The provided mod tools will help with packaging up a mod as well. Once packaged a player simply has to drop the mod package into their directory and the game will take care of the rest. We are also considering providing an official hub to upload mods to. Eventually, if the game gets onto Steam, we would love to support Steam Workshop. This is a service provided by Steam that allows players to easily share, search, and subscribe to game mods.

Players will be given the ability to enable/disable mods and even completely remove the mods all in game. The goal is to minimize the amount the player has to manage mods externally. We even have plans to make the multiplayer host (aka server) provide any missing mods to joining players.

The way that we will ensure that this game is truly mod friendly is by dogfooding it. All of the game content will actually be a mod to the game. With this philosophy we will be able to ensure that nothing is hardcoded and nearly every single aspect of the game can be modified. This won’t just include the basics such as items, monsters and tiles. It will include much more such as biomes, NPCs, character customization, and eventually the ability to add entirely new systems to the game.

In my next post I will go into the more technical side of how the game will be made mod friendly.

Sandbox Concept

I am almost ashamed to admit it, but I have never played Minecraft - “Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine.” I remember first hearing about it when it started to really pick up momentum about a year and a half ago. I watched videos of all of the amazing things that people would make in it but I never caved in. Due to Minecraft’s popularity, several Minecraft knock-offs have been done to only mimic the core basics, not add anything substantial to the formula, and then profit like mad. The first true exception I saw was Terraria, which actually builds onto the core mechanics of Minecraft and its inspirations. Terraria adds NPCs, much more in-depth fighting (bosses included!), and some more RPG elements.

Back in November Aaron, my brother and Siege Games designer, picked up Terraria and before too long I was sucked into it as well. We played an alarming number of hours before we even started to slow down. To revitalize the game some, Aaron began looking into the mods for the game and even tried making his own. I watched and cringed as he fumbled around trying to decompile the executable just in order to add a mod to the game. After much hackery he was able to get the game recompiled but broken. It wasn’t much longer when we decided that the game had ran its course.

Fast forward a few months, I had been struggling to get the movement down for Crazy Old Me for a few weeks. I knew its importance but it was really starting to take its toll on both the project and me. So much so that I began an innocent brainstorming of “If I were to make a game like Terraria, what would I do differently?” The answer was clear – “Easily moddable”. My excitement grew exponentially as I began to realize the implications that this could have. Many people describe Minecraft as a virtual Lego set. My envisioning is to not only let players play with the Legos but make it easy for them to build the Lego blocks as well. I’m sure Aaron and I could still be playing Terraria if we had at least some freedom in modding it. Of course, the core game has to be enjoyable enough to warrant mods and so Aaron and I had a more official brainstorming session. We came up with some more answers to my original question that could help set us apart.

We were thoroughly seduced by this sandbox idea. So much so that we knew we had to at the very least play around with the idea. Crazy Old Me had not been forgotten but and it did slow us down some but “we can come back to it in 2 weeks” was enough to convince us. So for the last two weeks we have been working adamantly on fleshing out this concept and working on an early alpha. The likelihood of us returning to Crazy Old Me dwindles everyday as we march forth to the holy procedurally generated land. Here are some (random) main points planned for the game. I will go into them in greater detail soon.

  • 2D platformer with building (somewhat given)
  • Easily moddable but with extreme flexibility
  • Unique crafting system
  • Core RPG elements (such as leveling)
  • Colorful and stylized art from Kelley McMorris
  • Multiplayer