>Image Created: Thursday, January 31st, 2008

finally

after such a long wait

my time has come

the world is full of maybes

And now for something a little different.

Sky Den is a Minecraft Skyblock-style map that I’ve been working on for a while now, and it’s finally reached public release. It’s a pack that includes several mods required to play. Everything you need is included in the download, and there are instructions in both the readme AND in the map itself, so it’s pretty simple.

Grab it here.

You will need Minecraft Forge. There are tutorials on how to get it installed, but basically you just put the contents of this file into your minecraft.jar file using winrar or whatever. If you have trouble with this step just look it up online.

Alternately, you can just install the Plus+ Launcher. Run it and select “Sky Den” from the pop-down menu. It’s as easy as that!

AS FOR THE MAP ITSELF.
I wrote up a big advertising speech using words like “robust experience” but instead I think I’ll just sum it up:

• Skyblock map means starting on a tiny island in an endless void and farming supplies to build an entire world around you.
• There are custom-designed NPCs who can trade and give quests that unlock new materials.
• Every resource in the game is renewable.
• By the end you’ll be living in a sky world you built nearly from scratch.

Basically it’s a lot of fun, and it’s way different from your standard Minecraft experience.
So if you want to try an unorthodox sky survival map and hang out with a bunch of gnoll villagers, why not give it a try?

Oh, and here’s the Minecraft Forums thread about it.

Look

I’ll grant your wish

but it’s sort of a “monkey’s paw” kind of thing

scribblenauts more like sociopath
nauts

uh oh

beep boop beep

Divequest Game

Design doc planning

Take two

DiveQuest game

Design brainstorm

First draft

Here’s a MediaFire link to the demo of The Little Things.

Same version as before, just a more reliable host.

Once again, the challenge is to catch all 6 creatures included in the demo.
Do your best!

There are 3 creatures to catch, and 3 evolutions.
But… the Mushworm can’t undergo metamorphosis.

Anyone collected all 6?

The Little Things Demo
Here’s a MediaFire Mirror

As I mentioned, it got as far as a playable demo

You’ll see what I mean about its flaws, though
Also keep in mind this is now several years old

See if you can collect all 6 creatures in the demo

The Little Things.

Get the Demo Here
Here’s a MediaFire Mirror

One of the games I came the farthest on, The Little Things is something like Pokemon meets Knytt, and takes the aspects of each I enjoyed most. Pokemon’s combat never struck me, but I enjoyed the collecting and evolving aspects. So I thought up this little game which involved catching and evolving (as well as buying and selling) various little critters, with combat replaced by exploration and light puzzles. Instead of fighting battle after battle, figuring out how to catch and evolve the creatures was itself the challenge in itself.

I came far enough to make a playable demo, but production ground to a halt shortly thereafter. There are a number of major obstacles preventing me even still from continuing this.

• Art direction. As a friend pointed out, it was often hard to tell what was important and what wasn’t. Glowing lights seemed like important objects, while item chests didn’t stand out. Background objects were too busy. Active sprites were too simple. Nothing worked visually.
• Interface. This is the big one. The UI is absolutely awful and no one I ever showed it to was able to use it properly without confusion. Even simple things like buying and selling, moving creatures from one container to another, or simple dialog looked terrible and were so unintuitive players could barely get it to work without extra guidance. Rewriting it was such a problem it stopped development almost single-handedly.
• Pointlessness. There are all sorts of useless features in the game, but one good example is the containers themselves. You could buy glass bottles to store certain creatures. For a little extra, you could buy colored glass bottles (sort of like the differently colored white pokeball you can get in Pokemon, which serves no real purpose). But there’s literally no functional reason to spend the extra gold and because of the shitty UI it doesn’t have enough of an impact on aesthetics even for people who might want such a thing.
• Time. It’s been so long since I worked on it, getting back into the poorly commented code and figuring out what everything did all over again is a daunting obstacle in itself.

I’m not saying I’ll never return to the idea, but honestly it doesn’t feel salvageable at this point.