Time

I am often asked when Innswich will be finished.

The best answer I have is, "when it can be".

To paraphrase some friends, I've been teased that I "drag my feet" on Innswich and other projects. As Minecraft is a hobby, I do not place it above such things as academic performance, or cooking dinner for and spending time with my wonderful girlfriend. Those things are more pressing and will always be more important. Minecraft is a game, and not an easy one to work with.

On a weekly basis, I find that I have maybe 2 whole days out of 7 which I can work on Minecraft. On at least 1 of those "free" days, I am often, but not always, in need of rest despite my desire to work. Very frequently, something pops up, and that day is consumed without so much as touching the launcher. Texelelf's filters in MCEdit save a lot of time, though. I can do a lot of work without even opening Minecraft.

Time is the overarching issue here. Until I get out of school, I simply cannot spare the time on KOTS:3 or other big maps. At best, I could shunt some time aside for a City of Love style project, but only because the redstone tech is already finished.

I need a better hobby.

Why use custom sounds?

Minecraft is a lighthearted game. It doesn't have a lot of "scary sounds", and what was scary at one point in the game's development is so familiar it doesn't rustle any jimmies. Players don't bat an eye to ghasts or endermen- at best, someone will tense up.

But when you throw in sounds unique only to the adventure you're in, you toy with expectations, you can surprise players. Jump scares, cheap as they are, depend just as much on sound as they do on visuals- the loud sound acts as a cue. "Be scared" says the screech of a Grunt in Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Audio in a game is feedback, really. It puts emotion and atmosphere into something where it wasn't before.

That clang is called a "stinger". In horror movies, using a piano stinger is a common way to suggest something scary is happening. If you tie it with the appearance of a monster, or turn the lights off in a room, it becomes the sinister Effect to a sinister Cause.

I'm just not able to do that in Minecraft with the existing sounds, so I replace them.

Innswich Peek 1

Click to embiggen

Here's a shot of Innswich in development. One of the things I'm toying with right now is the way health regenerates, and using the food bar to prevent health from changing after a set point. I think this is similar to the rules of UHC, but I'm not sure.

Unfortunately, I've run into a snag with the way the food bar is handled. Though a diminishing effect exists, Hunger, there is no recovery effect. This is entirely different from the way Instant Health and Instant Damage work.

There are three ways to recover the food bar:

1. Eat food. This is not automatic.
2. Be killed. Can be automatically done, but it's silly for the flow of the map.
3. Edit player data using an NBT editor. Not useful, because it's done outside the game.

I tried to increase the foodlevel using negative amplifications of Hunger, but it didn't work. Even if it did, it doesn't work with command blocks- only potions.

Thus, until I can control a player's foodLevel in more than one direction, I can't use this reliably. I have to assume players have any amount of health between 1 and 20, and thus lean on the side of keeping the food bar full at all times.

I hate that every adventure map turns into a food binge.

My current project: Innswich

I've been working on a story adaptation for a while now. I love horror stories, and the one that I've always wanted to do is H.P. Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth". Innsmouth is a fishing town with a dark secret, and the story follows a tourist's brief visit to the town, before being chased away by the things that lurk there.

I'm not the first to do an adaptation- there's a couple maps out there that are based on the same story. One came out a month after I started work on mine. I got mad about that, especially when it was played by the Yogscast, but I held my tongue and kept working.

When coming up with the name, I wanted something that sounded like the town in the original story. Innswich is the portmanteau of "Innsmouth" and "Dunwich", two notable locations in the Lovecraft Mythos. It didn't feel as awkward to say as some of the other names I came up with, so I used it.

I've taken artistic license with the story here and there, but it should still invoke the same tone from the story- a bleak, rotting town where there is more than meets the eye. I've used real architecture as the basis for many buildings in the town, based on some footwork I did. If you've ever walked around Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, you might recognize a few of the buildings in Innswich.

Innswich has unfortunately been a recurrent victim of "feature creep". Every snapshot, every update adds something that makes the map design easier, and more impressive. For the amount of time I am able to spend working on it, I can barely keep up with features from new versions of Minecraft, so it's been floundering around while I keep adding things.

It's gone through several iterations of design change- first it was an open city, everything connected. Then command blocks came along, and made it so I could splice the world together like scenes in a movie. Or levels in a proper game. Lots of texturepack editing and toying with spawners has even let me create animated cutscenes, where the story plays itself out automatically, and the player can just watch things unfold.

It'll be a little while yet until it's even ready for testing, but I'm sure the final product will be unlike anything seen before. At least in Minecraft, anyway.

Starting it out.

I've been playing Minecraft since before the Halloween Update two years ago, at the tail end of the game's Alpha development. After I was finally exposed to multiplayer Minecraft and a few notable YouTube channels that played the game, I wanted to make "adventure maps".

This isn't the first time I've ever felt like creating custom content for a game. There was this old game trilogy, "Marathon". It was packaged with programs called Anvil and Forge- tools to edit and create completely new scenarios and stories. There was documentation and tips online, and I read as much as a could. It was all about visibility, limitations of the game engine, what sounds, effects and game mechanics could be changed. Fascinating stuff, and it's all out there still, though you might need to use the Wayback Machine to read some of it.

It's too bad that the Marathon community isn't quite as lively as it used to be, although it still survives to this day as an open-source project, known as "Aleph One". There were a handful of really good custom scenarios out there, and the Marathon games are free to play now. Here's where you can find Aleph One and the custom scenarios.

When I learnt that Minecraft had tools like MCEdit, I felt that same urge to create custom content. I started watching video tutorials. I listened to and befriended a few mapmakers as well. Though Minecraft has its shortcomings and frustrations, it has a healthy community, and there is a demand of sorts for custom maps, in particular ones that run "vanilla".

The Minecraft developers have only recently decided to support mapmakers. There were bits and pieces here that have helped before, but only because they tied into the core survival game. There was a time when the only way you could tell a story was with long walls of signs (Books didn't exist yet). Thankfully, they do recognize some mapmakers now, and have since been adding helpful features between bugfixes.

I don't even pretend to be as productive as other mapmakers- people like ColdFusionGaming, Vechs and Jigarbov all have a much better work ethic than I do. I've had several false starts, and some discouraging episodes, but they've molded me into a better mapmaker than I was before.