After Lucas finished explaining the draft concept of Minecraft, everyone began rushing to prepare for different tasks.
Some people were in charge of the ongoing operations of Don't Starve and releasing its DLC content.
As for Minecraft, the reserved development period was more than half a year.
For Lucas, the current step was just helping Hector and the others understand the core gameplay ideas of Minecraft, and then starting with producing the game's art assets.
For the whole game, Lucas also needed to carefully write the base rule documents of Minecraft.
And unlike Minecraft in his past life, Lucas planned to make various improvements during its development.
The first was game modes.
In Lucas's plan, the initial version of Minecraft available to players would include three different modes.
The first was the pure single-player mode. This included both creative and survival gameplay.
A player would create a world, and then the terrain would be randomly generated. As players explored, the world would expand infinitely. There was no such thing as a border. In theory, the world size was only limited by the player's hard drive space.
Next was the multiplayer mode. This worked through servers created on players' own computers or on servers set up by players themselves.
On these servers, players could set up all kinds of rules. Server hosts could also add different MODs.
In short, the power to set the rules was in the players' hands.
The last mode was the official server, basically a clean server.
These were divided into creative and survival, each with fixed worlds. They were split into different regions, each with a cap of 2000 players, all distributed across one huge map.
Later, as more MODs were developed, official servers dedicated to mini-games would also be launched.
For example, Bed Wars, Hide and Seek, Build Battle, and so on…
At the same time, there were also issues related to personal player experience — such as the most frustrating problem Minecraft players had in his past life.
That is, after opening the server, the buildings and large projects people worked so hard to build would get destroyed by the flood of "troublemaker kids."
When they saw TNT blow everything up, many players felt like their hearts were breaking.
So in the past, many server owners would install plugins to prevent explosions, stop fluids from flowing from high places, block lava flow, claim land, and so on, to stop kids from destroying their hard work.
Lucas planned to make a system for this. In a player's own server, they could set special buildings to be unbreakable or limit other people's permissions, so they wouldn't have to deal with troublemakers.
Of course, since this part affects the player experience, it would only be tested after the first version of the game was done, with the test team trying it little by little and making changes based on real play.
Next came the basic materials of the world, following the model of Minecraft in the previous life.
Dirt, sand, stone, water, lava, trees, and all kinds of ores. For creatures, there would be pigs, cows, sheep, and so on.
With different materials, players could use crafting tables and other tools to combine them into new materials.
In the Nebula Games office, Lucas was carefully polishing the draft of Minecraft's core ideas.
Compared to the original game from the past life, Lucas also thought about adding in some of the best features from existing mods into Minecraft itself.
After all, Minecraft's core idea is openness.
What you make depends on yourself. The game should let players build more things directly, while also giving clearer and richer crafting guides and charts. At least players wouldn't need to struggle like before, having to search online for crafting recipes while playing the game without a recipe mod.
It's no exaggeration to say that without recipes, most players probably couldn't survive on their own in Minecraft.
There are simply too many things you can craft, and even many old players couldn't really remember them all.
At the same time, Lucas also had another idea for Minecraft: to add in some heavy modifications.
For example, more advanced tech crafting, so the game would have a fuller tech development path.
In fact, in the past life, Minecraft already had many mods like this.
At first, players could use different materials to build cars and guns.
But in the game, those were just lifeless objects. They couldn't move at all.
So to fix this, many talented mod makers created mods that made cars drive and guns fire. That way, in Minecraft, you could play FPS games or racing games, and if you wanted, you could even pilot a Gundam.
Lucas wanted to take those things and make them part of the game itself.
Why shouldn't cars move if players had built them properly?
Why shouldn't players be able to fly if they had built planes or rockets?
From a technical point of view, Lucas thought it wasn't really that hard.
As for whether players would understand it, like with high-level redstone?
Well, it's not like every player in the past understood redstone either.
It's well known that Minecraft players fall into different "civilization stages."
The first stage: cavemen living off raw meat. The second stage: early societies who learned the importance of raising animals. The third stage: the start of the industrial age, where you finally understand some basics of redstone.
After that, it's the world of the pros. They can build advanced redstone machines, even full computers inside the game, not just for simple calculations but also to run things like Chinese character input, Snake, or Minesweeper.
Of course, for most normal players, the situation looks more like this: while they're still using commands to copy blocks, the pros have already finished industrializing.
Besides these changes, there was another challenge for Lucas.
That was optimizing Minecraft's mods.
Just like in Overcooked and Fall Guys, where players could design levels, most of the maps were made modular, so players could piece them together with existing materials.
And clearly, Minecraft didn't work that way.
In the past, Minecraft had many versions.
At first, there was the Java Edition, developed with Java. Its main feature was being more open, but it wasn't very well optimized.
Thanks to Java, the early days of Minecraft had lots of mods, which made the game's ecosystem richer.
It also stayed as the favorite version for many players and mod creators.
Later came the Bedrock Edition. It had better optimization but was much less open. Mod creators didn't have as much freedom, and the amount of mod content was nowhere near the Java Edition.
For Lucas, since Minecraft directly used the official game engine, there was naturally no issue of having different versions.
This led to a pretty tough task.
Lucas had to create all kinds of open ports for Minecraft, along with the right tools, so players could more easily make their own content.
(End of The Chapter)
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