... I've been having a lot more fun with the latest Minecraft update than I thought I would ^_^'
If you haven't played the game in some time, now's a great time to return! The world's gotten a whole lot more atmosphere to it now- the oceans aren't just devoid of life, the open night sky is something to be feared once again, and the whole idea of 'waterlogged' blocks is a complete gamechanger. There's actually quite a lot of minor changes & additions, and it's honestly just fun to play & figure out new things once again.
One of my favorite things about the 1.13 update is the introduction of 'data packs'- user-defined .json files to modify the game in various ways. I've been having lots of fun creating & sharing my own custom recipes with reddit, so I've decided to catalogue my packs here on the blog for a bit more 'permanence'- you'll see there's now a 'links' section to the right, which I plan to extend as I release more stuff! I've put a whole lot of thought & effort into these recipes, and I'm pretty proud of what I've come up with- I feel like they really do extend the game to reduce tedium without affecting any core gameplay! Please do check them out if you're a fan of Minecraft :)
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Other than being completely & utterly distracted, I've been trying to be a bit constructive as well!
- Occasionally working a little more on my modpack; though, as I'm still waiting on the fix of a fairly game-breaking issue (which has a workaround, albeit a rather annoying one), I've had to accept the fact that it's not going to be releasable in the immediate future, at least until this bug gets fixed, or I change the pack & remove the offending mods... something that I really don't want to have to resort to at this point in the development cycle!
- Coming back to Urban Tumbleweed, I've hit the realization that I'm trying to put far too much effort into the building designs. It's going to be my first released game, and your first things are always your worst, so I shouldn't be wasting so much time trying to get everything to look 'perfect'- after all, the whole point of this project was really just for practice anyway! I'm beginning to mock up a few new design styles that will be much easier for me to produce, I just need to settle on one that works with the game's theme.
- More projects in the works- I've got some miniature ideas for more smaller games to work on. It's actually quite easy to come up with huge, grand ideas for the best game ever, but such ideas will never see the light of day in the hands of an independent developer; the hard part is compressing your ideas down into the most valuable parts, or as they call it in the industry, the Minimum Viable Product (or MVP). I want to work towards one of my grand ideas for a management/simulation game, but since I've never made anything of the sort before, I think I'll start by making a very simple version of the game first- largely to reduce design effort! Most of all though, I'm just finding it tricky to find inspiration to work on the Urban Tumbleweed project, as it's not really a type of game that I play often, so I'd really like a different style of project to work on as well. Still need to collect & organize my thoughts on the matter though, so watch this space :)
- Lig
