✨ Fantasy First | ㅤ
At the beginning and end of the day you play as a witch or wizard in a magical world. Every quest, activity, class, etc. should reflect this as much as possible. There should not be any mundane tasks that don’t, in some way, allude or connect to magic in concept. This means that content should utilise more magic, more animations, more spells, etc.
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🏆 Accessible vs Achievable | ㅤ
It is important to us that every player that chooses to reach Graduate is able to do so and is not gated by content that is not accessible. That being said, there is a difference, in our eyes, between content that should be able to be done by everyone and content that is completely optional.
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Adding more achievable content that is more difficult and time consuming that yields optional rewards is viable because those rewards aren’t required to complete the main game. As such, we want to make sure we have a clear distinction between content that will allow players to get to the end game versus content that is optional for endgame. Both are important to us, but as designers we want to be able to design rewards worth spending time earning.
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🕯️ Show, Don't Tell | ㅤ
For the future of our content design, we want to spend less time having the player “read what is happening” and more time “seeing/experiencing” what is happening. We understand the taxing nature of reading walls and walls of text to get the context of what is going on in a quest. We want to do our best to avoid long amounts of reading and more ‘to the point’ showing of the game content. That being said, sometimes for more tutorial-like content, it is necessary to make sure the players understand key concepts while we teach them new mechanics. Our attempts will be to keep reading to where necessary and “show the rest”.
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⛏️ Leaning into Minecraft Mechanics | ㅤ
To ensure PotterworldMC is new-user friendly, we want to make sure we are leaning into concepts that the greater Minecraft community already understands, things like how farming works, how repairing works, how interacting works, etc. This is imperative to us as it keeps with the flow of how Minecraft already works and it’s one less thing we will need to help the players understand if we design our content in tandem with it versus trying to create complicated new systems on its own. With this in mind, we do want to make sure we are doing things that are unique to our fantasy setting and allow ourselves room to craft unique systems while remaining true to Minecraft mechanics.
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🧹 Exploration is Key | ㅤ
We want to shift the concept of what exploring means in our world. Before, we had the quest book that clearly laid out every single quest that was available to our players. Moving forward into the new content design, we felt that this spoiled some of the excitement and exploration moments available to our players in a negative way. We couldn’t hide things that weren’t simple “hidden chests”. We want the ability to hide content for those keen on exploring the world to its fullest. We feel that this level of mystery and exploration could benefit allowing us to design “quests around every corner” that you can just happen upon and discover.
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With this mentality in mind, we want to lean into our more open world design, and reward players that are willing to venture forth and explore. A concept we are trying to keep in mind is “no dead ends”. Meaning, there should always be something at the end of… a hall, a quest, etc. in that everything completed should contribute to a form of reward to the player.
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🔗 Interconnected Systems | ㅤ
One of the most important pieces that we are focusing on for Potterworld 2.0 is designing systems that rely and interweave into each other. Creating an ecosystem between all the systems that ultimately support the main game. An example of this is making sure to use goods crafted from professions, gathered from nodes, spells learned in classes, etc. all work together to help the player conquer content.
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Currently, some of the side content is unnecessary and functions more as a novelty rather than serving any greater purpose in the main game. Shifting the philosophy so that “everything is useful in some way” will make systems have more meaning and naturally generate economies where players can openly trade and focus on different aspects of the game so everyone can progress.
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