Porting my MC mod to Minetest
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2017 15:56Hey guys,
No idea why this MC clone didn't come to my attention earlier. I only discovered it last night and i'm still overwhelmed by emotions and ideas that i literally had to suppress back when i had to give up writing a minecraft core mod 'Strugglecraft' a few years ago.
I put the link to the full description at the end of this post. In short, the mod changed and added to core game mechanics making survival a lot harder. Anyone who played pure survival games knows that the excitement comes from being challenged to perform at your best or eventually lose everything. With higher risk, comes higher reward. The goal of designing an interesting survival game is to confront the player with a myriad of obstacles, almost trying to make his life as miserably as possible. This might be quite counter-intuitive if you aren't experienced in designing sophisticated gameplay mechanics but the results speak for themselves.
Being an experienced gameplay mechanic designer the minecraft survival mode makes me laugh. It's the most underdeveloped part of the game with hardly anyone recognizing the potential. Don't get me wrong, i played it for hundreds maybe thousands of hours. But it still is a joke.
Minecraft literally creates a whole new world including almost everything you can think of. But you as a player aren't connected to your environment from a gameplay mechanics standpoint which takes away huge chunks of the gaming experience and i find it unacceptable. I want to get wet in the rain, keep warm near an oven or campfire at night, be afraid of the dark, swim in the summer sun, burn my feet on the hot desert sand, chill at the beach, slosh through the muddy swamps, collect enough food before the winter comes, build my home base heavy brick by heavy brick instead of light toy blocks and fight against real monsters not some noob fodder. I want realism!
My mod introduces frustration (like health or hunger) influenced by choice of food, darkness, warmth, biomes, weather, cold water, drugs (which you can grow yourself), personal traits (you can gain by leveling up,) wishes (randomly generated), sleeping, outdoor actvities and much more.
It changes the harvesting speed to about 10%, increases mob hitpoints to 1000%, introduces diseases, seasons, karma (each death will have lasting effects in your new life), drug dependencies, diets and eating disorders, MASSIVE but hard to find ore veins and new items.
Best thing, it is a ton of fun. I play tested in SP/MP for at least 200 hundred hours. Me and a some friends wouldn't touch the vanilla minecraft after playing it. It was still under heavy development and relied on constant text output via chat instead of a graphical interface. I had to use code injection on assembly language level which i didn't know when i drafted the mod. But as soon as i worked out the features and read through ten thousands of lines of minecraft code i knew i had a potential masterpiece in my hand and eventually had to learn assembly language, something i successfully avoided for 20 years. It took me north of 500 hours to get the mod where it is now, it was the dirtiest, most depressing and nerdiest job i've ever done. Modding minecraft on such a deep level makes you feel like a mad scientist, and you have to be insanely driven. Each little feature, even one-liners would turn into hours of work. Some features wouldn't work because of the complicated injection process. Also, it was almost impossible to update my mod to new versions of minecraft. Creating board/card/video games is a passion of mine ever since i learned to read, it sounds strange but i have to make games. It's something in my DNA i guess.
So i was in the middle of designing the best game i'd ever created and had to call it quits. That day something inside me died. I swore i would never talk or think about the mod anymore because every time i did, it hurt so bad. It was like somebody took away my child and i would never see it grow up. This is all to tell you how emotionally invested i am in this. So please don't get my hopes up prematurely when answering those questions ;)
I want to know if following things can be accomplished easily using the modding api:
- reducing block harvesting speed factor
- add a frustration bar (like the health display)
- changing mob hitpoints
- create slowness, slow harvesting aura/effects
- fully customize ore generation
Thanks in advance!!
-----
Strugglecraft MC Mod:
http://www.minecraftforge.net/forum/index.php?topic=14878.0
No idea why this MC clone didn't come to my attention earlier. I only discovered it last night and i'm still overwhelmed by emotions and ideas that i literally had to suppress back when i had to give up writing a minecraft core mod 'Strugglecraft' a few years ago.
I put the link to the full description at the end of this post. In short, the mod changed and added to core game mechanics making survival a lot harder. Anyone who played pure survival games knows that the excitement comes from being challenged to perform at your best or eventually lose everything. With higher risk, comes higher reward. The goal of designing an interesting survival game is to confront the player with a myriad of obstacles, almost trying to make his life as miserably as possible. This might be quite counter-intuitive if you aren't experienced in designing sophisticated gameplay mechanics but the results speak for themselves.
Being an experienced gameplay mechanic designer the minecraft survival mode makes me laugh. It's the most underdeveloped part of the game with hardly anyone recognizing the potential. Don't get me wrong, i played it for hundreds maybe thousands of hours. But it still is a joke.
Minecraft literally creates a whole new world including almost everything you can think of. But you as a player aren't connected to your environment from a gameplay mechanics standpoint which takes away huge chunks of the gaming experience and i find it unacceptable. I want to get wet in the rain, keep warm near an oven or campfire at night, be afraid of the dark, swim in the summer sun, burn my feet on the hot desert sand, chill at the beach, slosh through the muddy swamps, collect enough food before the winter comes, build my home base heavy brick by heavy brick instead of light toy blocks and fight against real monsters not some noob fodder. I want realism!
My mod introduces frustration (like health or hunger) influenced by choice of food, darkness, warmth, biomes, weather, cold water, drugs (which you can grow yourself), personal traits (you can gain by leveling up,) wishes (randomly generated), sleeping, outdoor actvities and much more.
It changes the harvesting speed to about 10%, increases mob hitpoints to 1000%, introduces diseases, seasons, karma (each death will have lasting effects in your new life), drug dependencies, diets and eating disorders, MASSIVE but hard to find ore veins and new items.
Best thing, it is a ton of fun. I play tested in SP/MP for at least 200 hundred hours. Me and a some friends wouldn't touch the vanilla minecraft after playing it. It was still under heavy development and relied on constant text output via chat instead of a graphical interface. I had to use code injection on assembly language level which i didn't know when i drafted the mod. But as soon as i worked out the features and read through ten thousands of lines of minecraft code i knew i had a potential masterpiece in my hand and eventually had to learn assembly language, something i successfully avoided for 20 years. It took me north of 500 hours to get the mod where it is now, it was the dirtiest, most depressing and nerdiest job i've ever done. Modding minecraft on such a deep level makes you feel like a mad scientist, and you have to be insanely driven. Each little feature, even one-liners would turn into hours of work. Some features wouldn't work because of the complicated injection process. Also, it was almost impossible to update my mod to new versions of minecraft. Creating board/card/video games is a passion of mine ever since i learned to read, it sounds strange but i have to make games. It's something in my DNA i guess.
So i was in the middle of designing the best game i'd ever created and had to call it quits. That day something inside me died. I swore i would never talk or think about the mod anymore because every time i did, it hurt so bad. It was like somebody took away my child and i would never see it grow up. This is all to tell you how emotionally invested i am in this. So please don't get my hopes up prematurely when answering those questions ;)
I want to know if following things can be accomplished easily using the modding api:
- reducing block harvesting speed factor
- add a frustration bar (like the health display)
- changing mob hitpoints
- create slowness, slow harvesting aura/effects
- fully customize ore generation
Thanks in advance!!
-----
Strugglecraft MC Mod:
http://www.minecraftforge.net/forum/index.php?topic=14878.0