MINECRAFT LEGENDS DLC
Technical Designer
Engine: In-house
Minecraft Legends is an RTS-like spin-off of Minecraft developed by Mojang and Blackbird Interactive in conjunction with House of How.
House of How created various dedicated experiences in the form of DLC for the game using Legends' in-house engine. The games I worked on here were the Action-Adventure game Ichorous Grove (0:30, Trailer #1), Platformer game Magic Carpet (0:15, Trailer #1) and Survivors-like game Endless Hordes (0:28, Trailer #2).
Both Blackbird and Mojang were happy with our output in this endeavor and all parties look forward to working together again.
I performed many design duties over the different DLCs - UX, System Design, Level Design, Balancing and other related disciplines based on need:
- I partook heavily in the iteration process of all projects I was involved in, suggesting relevant features for expansion and depth appropriate for the scope.
- I designed the metaprogression system for Endless Hordes. It was minimally invasive and scoped to reward just enough differing gameplay for a few hours (which was the target), after a short while rewarding some of the more advanced features like the elemental combo system progressively, which I also designed. The elemental combo system additionally went on to be one of the game's absoul
- I was responsible for a significant rework of the World Design for Ichorous Grove as I opined it had made for impossibly huge swaths of empty corridors that instead of being "palette cleansers" from intense combat became gigantic mazes of confusion and boredom according to most playtesters, which the Design Director agreed with. I thus I created the concept of a nexus, a "semi-hub" that naturally connected to most regions of the map but also minimized backtracking, á la the initial Tallon IV Overworld areas from Metroid Prime. It was very well received and managed to cut down the workload of the heavily pressured Art team's requirements immensely.
- I revised and reworked our enemy designs for Ichorous Grove after noticing a distinct lack of enemy variety and enemy composition, coming up with the idea of having dedicated Healer enemies, Charger enemies with clear telegraphy, specific Tank-oriented enemies and enemies that Buffed others - all interspersed within hordes of smaller, dopamine fueling low health enemies.
- Even with a large Level Design team, I managed to create over half of the levels for Magic Carpet as they reviewed well internally and I was quick at it. We ended up with about 3 times the content we had expected to produce which was very good for the value of the product.
- I provided design iteration and continual evaluation of all products I was involved in, Magic Carpet ending up as one of BBI and Mojang's favorite DLCs.
- I took note of the large scope creep and art attrition of Ichorous Grove and made sure to scope Magic Carpet accordingly, pushing heavily for asset and tech reuse and a 2D perspective that required much less art and was much faster to create levels and content for.
- I provided task management planning assistance and initiative for Endless Hordes and Magic Carpet (Azure DevOps).
I performed a great deal of systems programming using TypeScript in conjunction with the engine's JSON-based ECS system:
- Although I implemented many other systems in the other DLCs as well, I provided almost the entire backbone tech-wise for Endless Hordes:
- I created an intuitive and extensible wave spawner system for easy level design, where the level designer could assign select enemies to spawn at specific times and during intervals as well as obstacles, win conditions, gamemodes, wave type (infinite, freeplay);
- I created the upgrade system - focusing on the easy addition of new upgrades in a way would also allow for easy integration with the metaprogression system;
- I created the saving system;
- I implemented the metaprogression system, which was based off of an account XP system for currency gain, and a shop based on tiers where purchasing more metaupgrades rewarded higher tiers of metaupgrades, the upgrades themselves varying from simply more damage to wholly new mechanics - this also entailed developing a system for localizable information about the upgrades;
- I created the Hub system along with its constituent level select and death/respawn system;
- I created an unlockable elemental combo system that recognized when the player had fully leveled up two upgrades in a run and combined their effects into a new one, additionally making sure to allow for as much feedback from this as possible and thus granting the player a satisfying boost in power and differing gameplay.
Even after enrolling on my next project, I still made sure provide assistance wherever explicitly needed on Horde Survivors so that it was not unnecessarily blocked.
- I set up the initial project for Magic Carpet, underlying world tech and level creation pipeline, reusing many assets and techniques from Ichorous Grove and thus landing us in the production phase quite early.
- I set up the tech for the 2D perspective we would use for Magic Carpet.
- I created and finalized the music and ambience audio system for our largest project in the Legends' pipeline Ichorous Grove, providing an evolving and dynamic soundtrack based on location, biome and situation with advanced FMOD interfacing.
- I created a dedicated weather and time of day system integrated with the audio system in Ichorous Grove for advanced configuration of individual environments.
