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Game Design Blog - April 2023 - State of the Game

Potterworld

Administrator
Staff member
Staff
#1

Welcome back to our Game Design Blog!
It’s been quite some time since our last blog, as we had a series of Droobletalks to discuss the future of PotterworldMC! If you missed them, you can find the Droobletalks here. With that being said, we have a lot of ground to cover for today's blog, as we’ll be laying out the lessons learned in 2022, and what we’ll be doing for 2023 and beyond. So, without further ado, let’s jump in!

2022 - Retrospective
Game Design Team Changes

2022 was a year full of changes. Specifically, we worked to streamline Game Design production, by combining all of the teams together, to allow the Game Designers, including Leadership, to be able to design different parts of the server, including World Content and Events. We’ve found this to have been mostly successful, as it’s allowed us to be a more cohesive team and work to allocate resources accordingly. After this merge, we worked through several updates and events, including Butterbrew, Halloween, and the Winter Waltz, as well as World Content such as the revamp of the First Year Experience. However, above all else, the change alleviated one of the largest concerns that has plagued the Game Design team for several years: Burnout.

Game Design Team Burnout

Burnout. It happens. Despite our best efforts, everyone gets burnt out at one point or another. As we’re all volunteers, it's bound to happen. It doesn’t happen just to specific people either - every Game Design member, from Lead Game Designers to Junior Game Designers all have felt this stress. When we were working through changes for the Game Design Team, we had several discussions on how best to manage burnout. The solution that we found was rotating members from World Project to Events, and vice versa. For reference, a single Event takes 6-8 weeks to develop, and during that time, it’s all hands on deck. After that, those members and leads may want to take a break, instead of diving right back in. However, in our old system, there was very little room to do this. We had two large portions of the year where the team would have to go from one event to another, such as Valentines to Spring to May the 4th to Anniversary, and then again from Butterbrew to Halloween to Winter Waltz. That doesn’t leave much time to recoup after a massive project! The Potterworld Game Design team is very passionate about bringing our best work for our community to enjoy. This is why every one of us pour our time and passion into making content for you all. Despite the expectation that we are a “live service game” we are not. Potterworld is a hobby server - something that all of us are volunteering to do because we enjoy it. However, because of how much we all care we are constantly trying to please you all to the best of our ability. Great as these intentions are, it does also contribute to that same concern of burnout.

Searching for Solutions in 2023

So, with all of that lingering in our minds, we worked to find solutions to try to alleviate any burnout that may arise. After much discussion, we’ve arrived at the following conclusions for 2023:

Event Size

What we decided to do is separate events into two categories: Large Events and Small Events. This would allow us to have different size groups work on events, while also allowing time for members to have breaks. You’ve already seen the efforts of this play out, as most of the Spring 2023 event was designed by one single person! Below, we’ll be going into detail of which events this year will be “Large” events versus which events will be “Small” events.

Event Resources

Another issue we ran into was the amount of resources that was used for each event. Not just Game Design resources, but resources from other departments as well. For each event, copious Build Requests & Skin Requests had to be made, and our wonderful Testing Teams had to test all of the content we made. This limited our ability to produce content for the world, as resources had to be allocated to Events first. With that in mind, we’ve made the decision to have many of the locations for this year be returning locations, some of which will include old quests that players will be able to complete again. To help understand this decision, reusing builds would help us cut down on “lead-up” time to working on an event. Crafting content is always a linear process. First, the design for the event must be drafted. Second, all departments must be consulted to approve the idea. Next, the build must be made. During this time the paper design of all the quests and activities for an Event are crafted but can’t be made real until the build is delivered. Once delivered, the Game Design team can then craft the quests and content into the final build and then send it all off to testing. Because of this approach, if any part of that process is delayed or takes longer than intended, everyone is affected and thus causes delays in the delivering of any content. In order to combat this, this year we decided to reuse some favorite builds that haven’t been seen in years to help cut down that linear process. Game design won’t have to wait for a build if the build already exists. So in this, we save that time and we can rededicate the build team’s time to other priority projects.

We’ll be going into further detail about each event below!

2022 Retrospective - Final Thoughts

With all of that in mind, we’ve learned a lot of lessons throughout 2022, and as we look to the future, we're excited to share with you everything that we have in store. So without further adieu, here is the Roadmap for 2023 and beyond…



2023 - Roadmap
Now, that’s quite a lot of information, so let’s jump into it together. Let’s start with Events!​

2023 Events

We want to be transparent with you, and let you know which events will be coming back for 2023. The Spring Event is already live, so let’s find out what the rest of the year has in store! Each event is listed below, along with if it’s considered a “Big” event or a “Small” event, as well as if we’ll be visiting somewhere new, or revisiting an old favorite. If it’s an older location, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there won’t be new content, as evidenced by the Spring Event.


Spring - Small Event, Old Location

May the 4th- Small Event, Old Location

Pride - Big Event, New Location

Butterbrew - Small Event, New Location

Halloween - Big Event, Old Location

Winter Waltz - Big Event, New Location


You’ll notice that one event we’ve had in years past is absent from this list - Anniversary. As this fell during the busiest time for us, we’ve made the decisions to cut back on the content for this event. This doesn’t mean that we are not having an anniversary event. Instead, we’ll be focusing on celebrating the server in fun ways, including some exclusive goodies, and holding a small anniversary event this year.

So, what does that clear our team up to do? Well, let’s take a look at the other side of the chart and find out!

2023 World Content

As we move into 2023, we want to focus a lot of our energy on the World itself. We know that the world should be brimming with life, with secrets and tons of activities for players to stumble upon. We also know that we need to ensure that there are plenty of opportunities for players to obtain XP. We’ve already released the first step of this process, with the town of Woodshire now available for players starting at level 51. But what about the rest of the world? Well, let’s take a look…

First up, we have a new Graduate Gauntlet, called Repressed Evil, coming out later this year. This will be our second Graduate Gauntlet, as we want to ensure that we continue to provide content for our core playerbase. You can see a few images of the Gauntlet below, which should give you some hints as to where it will take place…
Secondly, We’ll be working to revamp Appleby on the map, specifically redesigning the town’s design from the ground up. This should be released towards the end of the year, and we’re super excited to see it come together.

Lastly, we have one final thing looming on the horizon, which will be our main focus for 2023 and beyond…

Potterworld 2.0
As we announced some time ago, the Game Design team is hard at work designing the next evolution of PotterworldMC - Potterworld 2.0. This will include a complete revamp of many of the core systems, an update to 1.16 or beyond, and the long awaited Main Storyline. For the past several months, we’ve been hard at work both paper designing and prototyping new systems, sketching out the story for the Main Storyline, and our development team has been tirelessly working to update the server to 1.16+.

Potterworld 2.0 - Challenges & Setbacks

With all of that being said, we came to realize that the Game Design team was at a crossroads. As the Developers continued to make headway on upgrading the server to 1.16+, we quickly realized that the Game Design Team could not begin most of our work until 1.16 was mostly ready. 1.16 provides a TON of tools and new mechanics that we want to include for 2.0, in order for us to unleash our full potential and make sure we get it right. For example, right now, we’re limited on the items that are stackable, as only certain items in vanilla minecraft can be stacked. This is of particular interest as we want to make sure resources that you find out in the world can be stacked in your inventory. However, in 1.16, we would have access to infinite models, which would allow us to have infinite stacked items. This is just one example of hundreds of pieces of tech that would allow us to make Potterworld 2.0 incredible.


With all of that being said, we then had a decision to make. With no Estimate of how long 1.16 would take, we could either hold off on further developing Potterworld 2.0 until 1.16 is ready, or design Potterworld 2.0 for the current version, forgoing all of the technological advancements newer versions of Minecraft have. After much discussion, we’ve decided to continue development where we can for 2.0, but focus on continued support of our game as it stands today, which includes filling the world with tons of new content - Quests, Activities, Repeatable Quests, Secrets, you name it!


For the remainder of 2023, we’ll be working to pump out new content all over the world. These won’t necessarily be towns, as those take quite a bit of time, but they will all have various pieces of content, with plenty of XP and various rewards to ensure players can level up faster than ever before. What makes this even better is that all of this content, just like all the rest of our main world content, will eventually be ported into 2.0, and continue to exist. We’ll also be working to tweak various systems from Revelius, including incentivizing Professions, buffing XP earned from Reputation, and much, much more. We’ll be slowly sending these changes out in the next few months, so keep an eye out!

Conclusion
For those of you who made it to the end of this post. Thank you for sticking with us! We hope all of this gives you a better sense of what it is we’re doing behind the scenes, and our plans moving forward for 2023 and beyond. We cannot wait to share more details and the upcoming changes in the near future, and we hope you enjoy all of the content on the horizon!

Sincerely,

The Game Design Leadership Team
 

GreatLordOz

Magician
Minecraft IGN: GreatLordOz
Honeybadger Auralock Dark Follower Phoenix
#2
Do what you need to do development team! A burnout staff team is a dead staff team, so focus on making things manageable for you all! Although this is likely not an option on the table, I would sacrifice half of the events in order to boost 1.16+ launch as that will inevitably bring in more players with compatibility patches for 1.17/1.18/1.19. Anyways, best of luck!
 

Pankakes

Animorphus
Minecraft IGN: Pankakes_81
Griffin
#4
Potterworld 2.0. This will include a complete revamp of many of the core systems, an update to 1.16 or beyond, and the long awaited Main Storyline.
Will the support for current versions be dropped once PW is on 1.16 ?

Would dropping the current versions once 1.16 is supported make it easier for devs to work on the server, as supporting such old versions wouldn't be needed ?

Is there a reason why 1.16 in particular, instead of a newer version like 1.18, that introduced higher build limit, which, for example, could be utilized for the Hogsworth lake as a new underwater expansion.
(I'm not familiar with the server plugins, but the modding scene has moved on from 1.16 long ago, including especially useful mods like Sodium and Iris)
 

Harrison

Assistant to Head of Technology & Development
Head Staff
Staff
Minecraft IGN: Teheeo
Assistant Auralock Dark Follower Staff Phoenix Raven Vampire Werewolf Arithmancer SPEW
#6
Hi, I thought I'd reply to some of these from the Development perspective.

Will the support for current versions be dropped once PW is on 1.16 ?
We haven't really confirmed this yet or decided how we want to go about it as it is a conversation that would happen much later down the line. So we're not too sure yet.

Would dropping the current versions once 1.16 is supported make it easier for devs to work on the server, as supporting such old versions wouldn't be needed ?
The way we're designing the server upgrade, is that we're not really re-writing parts of code, instead we're doing "expansions" per se which just allow us to alter tiny bits of code for the later minecraft versions on top of our 1.10 base code. So in reality we'll always have the base code that can run in 1.10, as that is what the current 1.16 code is built off of, minus the extra 1.16 (or beyond) parts that we plug into it.

Is there a reason why 1.16 in particular, instead of a newer version like 1.18, that introduced higher build limit, which, for example, could be utilized for the Hogsworth lake as a new underwater expansion.
At the time this project begun back in 2020, the stable version at the time was 1.16 I believe, so a large chunk of code had been already made. So we wanted to continue to go ahead with that so it didn't go to waste, and as that is the largest code-base jump. From then on up it is just smaller changes that are easier to manage. However a key feature of the way that we have designed our 1.16 upgrade is that because of the nature where it just plugs in extra version support on top of our existing 1.10 code, it gives us the ability to easily bump up our code to a higher version if the time comes. So it might be that we get some stuff working in 1.16 and it all hooked up nicely, but then decide we want to take one step further. That would be relatively straightforward to do with the current code structure we are pursuing. So yeah we haven't really confirmed 1.16 as the version we'll be sticking to, we've just used it as the base line for the time-being, but that may change.

For more information on the server upgrade plans, there is some information here on the January Development blog: https://potterworldmc.com/threads/development-blog-january-2023.14570/#upgrading