Chapter 227 - VR Game Development Principles (1/2)

How popular was Minecraft in Chen Mo’s previous world?

In a nutshell, it is the most successful indie game in terms of popularity and business bar none; it’s the second most sold game in the world, exceeding 100 million copies, second only to Tetris.

Upon considering 2009, the year when Minecraft was released, there were already quite a few decent PC and console games, it was nothing short of a miracle to be able to achieve success like that.

Moreover, Minecraft could and was ported to PC, console, tablets and mobile.

There are some more numbers that could back up this incredible popularity.

In 2014, Mojang the studio responsible for Minecraft was purchased by Microsoft with 2.5 billion USD.

Minecraft had over 4.31 billion views on Youtube.

There were over ten million players joining the beta test, making it the most popular game in beat.

Ordnance Survey of Britain recreated the entire British Isle with twenty-two billion blocks.

What mysterious power did the game have to be able to attract so many players?

To put it simply, Minecraft dramatically decreased the difficulty of making a 3D object on computers.

Many have had ideas of creating their own space/world. They might realise it through sandcastles, Legos, or paper mache when they were younger, and use games to do that when they get older.

There are many ways to create a virtual world on the computer, but traditional 3D softwares possessed a steep learning curve, and many didn’t have the patience to do it from scratch.

And Minecraft was a way for the vast majority to easily create a 3D world.

They just had to put the block down.

There was no need for materials, textures, rendering, terrain, vegetation, or particle effects. All you had to do was place down the block you chose.

The blocks in Minecraft were all 1m*1m*1m, so players wouldn’t find themselves losing perspective in the virtual work, and the finished products would be more believable too.

Moreover, Minecraft wasn’t just a method for creating worlds, it had really rich gameplay as well.

For Chen Mo, porting this game to VR was something really challenging, and really meaningful.

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After having gone through the design document, everyone started working. Chen Mo’s mention of tech-trees, artstyle, and the game modes were enough to keep them occupied for a long time.

There wasn’t anything to use as reference after all, how would you approach a game that was similar to Leggos? What would it look like? How do you deal with details?

This was something everyone had to think long and hard.

Chen Mo went back to his office on the second floor of the experience store and started looking into the restrictions he had making VR games.

The Illusion Game Editor supported VR games, but the ways of making a game were much different than PC and mobile games.

As an A-grade videogame designer and an honorary member of the Game Committee, he had plenty of rights in the Illusion Game Editor and could start working on VR games.