Eagle-eyed members of the community may have noticed we launched a new feature yesterday: our very-own Let’s Play! It was full of procedurally-generated zombie-hunting goodness, including all the staples of the genre, such as zombie-killing super-eggs, white-knuckled debugging, and a zombnado (Sharknado, take note). You can join in on the fun next week by following our Twitch channel and tuning in on Thursday at 5PM PST, or relive the excitement of our first episode now by viewing it here. It was a total blast, and we hope you join us again next week!
Zombies! Zombies everywhere!
So what’s the big idea, you ask? What’s so cool about these Let’s Plays that set them apart from the rest? Well, here’s the pitch: week after week, the Content Team plows away at making the biggest, scariest, most fun Zombie Apocalypse mod in the whole Minecraftiverse, then hang out with Sarah every Thursday and show her what we’ve made. We invite a few friends, test out the mod, and see what works and what doesn’t. Sarah helps us out, throwing suggestions and editing code on the fly, and we take suggestions from the chat on where to go next. Then we pack up, head out, and work another week on improving the mod. Next Thursday, the cycle repeats. We keep iterating, day after day, as our code grows and our mod becomes more complex. And you can watch, give feedback, throw suggestions, become an active part of this mod as it develops. Pretty cool, huh?
The Content Team, ready for battle!
And that’s not even the coolest part. You can copy the mods we test at any time to your mod chest, even during the stream! The mod we were running on Thursday can be found right here (make sure to follow me, its creator! I may or may not be the real Notch), or you can import the various libraries that made it shine to your own game and create your own awesome procedurally-generated zombie apocalypse (Carlos’s awesome AI library that governs our zombies can be found here, Sonny’s expansive and powerful two-part chest generation library can be found here and here, and my own dungeon generation library is right here)! Test them out and let us know what you think, or what you make! The literally-endless world of Minecraft is your oyster.
Libraries!
Now, it wouldn’t be programming and making something awesome and ambitious if something didn’t go a little bit sideways. Even though LearnToMod makes coding massive mods easier to manage and a heck of a lot more fun, nothing can stop the inevitable need to debug, and debug we inevitably needed to do. In one such instance, Sarah wanted to turn our most powerful zombie-killing weapon, the normal old egg (modded to kill the zombies in one hit), into a semi-adorable dragonfly using our super-easy and super-awesome texture pack editor. A few clicks later, and this smiling buddy had replaced the egg texture:
A dragonfly 🙂
Or so we thought. Loading our texture pack back into Minecraft, our friend was nowhere to be found, even when we had the egg equipped! It stumped us, and although we didn’t have time to get to the bottom of the problem on the stream, the case of the disappearing dragonfly haunted us. Minutes after the stream ended, Sarah was checking out her inventory and was startled to see that, yes, the egg-turned-dragonfly was there after all, but was the wrong egg! Instead of being the boring-old normal egg, she had accidentally textured the basic spawn egg, creating this kaleidoscope of colors:
Many dragonflies 😮
Look at that! Minecraft took the shape of the dragonfly then automatically painted it with the same color scheme as the original spawn egg (since each spawn egg is a different color in the base game). Minecraft works in mysterious ways – and, thanks to the ease of our texture pack editor, putting the dragonfly on the right egg is an easy fix. Egg crisis averted!
Now: next week! We’re working on making the mod tighter, with better random-generation of environments and loot, tighter and deadlier AI, a scoring system, levels, and, of course, crazier zombnados. We hope to see you there!
-Erik and the Content Team