Almighty Video Game Designer

Chapter 228: Basic Rules of the World

Every game had design restrictions based on their platform.

For example, racing games on PC always only had two perspectives, from the inside of the car or outside the car.

It was because the field of view in first person PC games are usually 75° to 90°, whereas humans have a 124° field of view.

Meaning, because of restrictions of a display on PC, it was impossible to have complete representation from a human point of view outside of having two more monitors.

Most players wouldn’t get two more monitors just to play racing games, so the viewing angle within the car would feel really narrow.

At times like these, a view from the top of the car is needed as the field of view is widened, meaning that the players could see more, making it feel more natural.

(This applied to PUBG as well.)

This design of having two different perspectives was a result of limitations of PC.

Similarly, although VR games were way better at conveying games than PC, it also had a similar downfall. The designs of VR games were also restricted by VR technology.

Most popular VR games were in first person mode, and the flow of producing games all followed the same ‘release on PC before porting to VR’ model.

First step of porting a PC game was to improve the quality of the graphics and models to meet the requirements of a VR game. This improvement would normally cost about ten times the resource. This was also where most of the money goes.

The second step was to port PC controls in VR controls. This was mostly done in the game editor, converting signals received from players using special equipment and converting it one to one to the established controls.

For example, the design could use his intentions of jumping and link it to jumping in the game. When the players would think about jumping, the character in the game would follow.

The game would also have an increased field of view up to 124°. Other senses such as smell, hearing, and touch would also be ported to the VR.

Third step was to make minor changes according to the game to make it feel better for VR players.

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After looking through the main points he had to consider making a VR game, Chen Mo started working on the rules of Minecraft.

In the first stage, Chen Mo planned to make it on PC and recreate the original before porting it to VR.

First was the basic rules of the world.

Chen Mo planned for single player modes as well as local and online multiplayer modes.

Of which, singleplayer and local multiplayer could be interchanged (just like Diablo 3), and the worlds could grow indefinitely as it would be procedurally generated by the game (A limit on players should be added.).

Online maps should support up to ten thousand players. The world would be locked at one hundred thousand square kilometers, which would be similar in area to a province.

The basic resources would be more or less the same as the original Minecraft, such as stone, water, lava, sand, gravel, gold, iron, coal, wood, leaves, diamond, ice…

More could be added depending on the situation.

Other crafting material such as sticks, planks, leather, seeds, equipment used to gather such as shovels and pickaxes, transportation such as rails, minecarts and boats, tools for fighting such as sword, helmet, and chestpiece… There were hundreds of these, and more could be added in the future.

Although Chen Mo hadn’t looked at the design document for Minecraft, he could guess what the generation rules looked like.

First was generating the base of the world and the shape of the land.

Generate various biomes and their -edges, adding hills and mountains- adding ocean edges to these biomes- minor adjustments- add rivers.

Step two was filling in the stone, water and air blocks based on the height limit.

Third was completing the biomes, adding grass and stone if it was plains, adding sand and stone if it was a desert… Filling in the entire map as well as adding bedrock.

Fourth was generating special structures such as caves, ravines, ore deposits, villages, temples, ocean monuments…

Special structures such as villages and desert temples were formed using predetermined resources. Chen Mo thought that he could add more special structures to make the world feel even more alive.

Fifth was generating light.

Sixth was adding special units (furnaces and chests have their own random algorithm).

Seventh was generating pools of water and magma. Obviously lava pools have a much lower spawn rate than water pools.

Eight was adding ore. The types of ore are mainly determined by the height, such as dirt, gravel, coal, iron, gold, restone, diamond…

Ninth was adding the little details such as sand, clay and gravel next to bodies of water, plants, trees and mushrooms on soil…

Last but not least was adding mobs such as cows, shepe, pigs, and chicken.

Of course, this was Chen Mo’s guess. It might be different from the original Minecraft, but it wouldn’t be too far off.

After this process, the world was complete and the players could start exploring as their own little character.

The actions players could perform in the original game included moving, jumping, attacking, mining and placing. There were also some animation mods that added climbing, hanging, sneaking, and facial expressions.

Chen Mo could do all of these animations and increase the animations the players had to make it feel more realistic (of course, the graphics needed to be improved accordingly).

A dozen or so animations weren’t a big deal for a big VR RPG game, nor will the players feel drained and overwhelmed by the number of controls, allowing the players to play for a long time while improving the depth of the game.

Moreover, Chen Mo was thinking about improving on the other aspects of the game.

For example, in the original the players could craft doors and sticks with planks using the world bench. Chen Mo planned to expand on this to allow the players to craft more items while making it more clear and concise.