Minecraft

Bedrock Edition and Minecraft: Earth

Contract Gameplay Engineer | May 2019 - February 2021

About Minecraft

Minecraft is one of the most recognizable brands on the planet, and has long been one of my favorite games. The idea that a beautiful, infinite world could be generated using nothing but math and clever logic captivated me as an early game dev student - in fact I later spent months working on a Minecraft clone in my own engine to toy with procedural generation techniques. When I was presented the opportunity to take on a contract with the Minecraft team, I was absolutely thrilled to have my first official role in the industry be on a team I had admired for years.

My Role

At Minecraft, I worked on the final stages of developing the AR mobile game Minecraft: Earth, and brought relevant changes made in the Minecraft: Earth engine back into Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. Over the course of my contract, I primarily worked on the Character Creator in both Minecraft: Earth and Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, and on the Mobs team on Minecraft: Earth.

Specs

Role:	Contract Gameplay Engineer
Platforms	Windows, Mobile, Xbox, Playstation
Engine	Bedrock Engine
Tools:	C++, JSON, TypeScript

Character Creator

Alongside the launch of Minecraft: Earth, the team developed an in-depth character creator for both Minecraft: Earth and Minecraft: Bedrock Edition. This character creator allowed players to customize every aspect of their minecraft character, including changing skin color, size, facial features, hair, and adding a wide range of layer-able clothing options to their character.

On this team, I worked on developing the UI and backend system for Minecraft: Earth, and later worked on the UI and backend system on the creator in Bedrock Edition. I worked closely with UX designers and the marketplace team to ensure players would have a seamless experience the tool. I also prototyped and implemented new tech for the in-menu player rendering, including emote animations and glowing clothing articles.

Mobs

Once work on the character creator was wrapping up, I transitioned onto the Mobs team on Minecraft: Earth. This team developed many new and exciting variants of existing Minecraft creatures for players to collect in Minecraft: Earth. These variants ranged from simple re-skins of basic mobs, to complex variants with new behaviors, animations, and animated textures.

As part of this role, I worked to develop new behaviors for mobs, which could be customized by designers using TypeScript. For example, I developed a new combat system for the hostile mob the Viler Witch, which involved adding a new attack to spawn poison clouds at a target location. This system was developed as a data-driven behavior, so that designers could easily assign similar behavior to new mobs using JSON.

This role also involved updating existing Bedrock mobs to support data-driven behaviors. In one such case, I updated the Minecraft squid from being exclusively controlled by c++ code, to executing behaviors defined through JSON so that designers could tweak behavior between different variants. This allowed for squids to be added to Minecraft: Earth, and allowed for the addition of the Glow Squid, which has an animated texture and emits glowing particles. This mob was later introduced to Minecraft: Bedrock Edition, and remains my favorite mob to this day!