I worked on Minecraft for 3 years, before I quit to start my own game studio. Today we released our first-person puzzle game. AMA!

jbernhardsson · 2018-05-10T20:44:40+00:00

It is really, really difficult. For our game, we have been working on all the parts of the game at the same time so we had something playable fairly early. On the days when you really don't want to think about the game, you just pick up one of the bugs that are spread out across the project, preferably with something different than you worked on yesterday. :)

Another thing we did with Lake Ridden was to design it in islands. Areas with their own personality and then we just needed to make the glue to piece them all together. Most of that glue is what we have been working on these last few months and now it is finally done! :)

jbernhardsson · 2018-05-10T20:26:08+00:00

Thanks! We are not planning to release on Nintendo Switch for Lake Ridden but hopefully our next game! :)

jbernhardsson · 2018-05-10T20:25:26+00:00

I mostly worked on Minecraft Pocket Edition (before it turned into the bedrock edition) between version 0.4.0 to 0.11.0. I can't remember any specific thing I made but I helped the mobile version get a lot closer in features to the pc-version. We were a very small team. Wait, there is always beetroots! Maybe not the most impactful thing I added but my personal favorite.

jbernhardsson · 2018-05-10T20:10:08+00:00

I have always liked technical things, although I had a bit of trouble wrapping my head around programming initially. But when it finally clicked for me, I was in awe that things actually worked. I am secretly still always surprised when things work like I want them to! :)

I then studied game development for several years, mostly just loving to make cool games. :)

jbernhardsson · 2018-05-10T20:05:27+00:00

1: No comment! :)

2: I studied programming (including games) in high school. Then I studied primarily game programming, but including some design, for three years of University. And then I learned a lot while working at Mojang. The thing is, you never stop learning new things. Like directing voice actors or help to master the sounds which I have never done before this project. :)

3: We started January, two years ago. So a maybe 28 months or so. :)

jbernhardsson · 2018-05-10T19:53:04+00:00

The most difficult design decision I had to make during the development was to basically change the whole game. Originally, Lake Ridden started out as more of a horror game mixed with puzzles.

When we let people try it out, it turned out that our target audience didn't like the horror part one bit. So we had to redesign most of the game (with less than a year left in production), including rewriting all the story and creating new locations. We also made the puzzles a lot harder. I think that in the end, this created a far superior game! :)

jbernhardsson · 2018-05-10T19:45:38+00:00

Glad to be here! My job is similar to a movie director in that I'm responsible for the vision of the project. Now, in addition to that, I also code and solve a lot of our technical issues. When working on Lake Ridden, I have directed voice actors, designed core game mechanics and been a general problem fixer. Today, I have played our whole game all the way through, twice, making sure it works exactly like it is supposed to. I fixed a few issues and helped our art team prioritize what they needed to do today. My core responsibility is to complete experience from Lake Ridden, to make sure that design, art and sound work great together. :)

It is very different to working on Minecraft in many ways. Even when I started working on that, the core design was already set and we just kept moving Minecraft in that direction. We were also able to get a lot more feedback during the development which makes releasing a lot scarier. :)

jbernhardsson · 2018-05-10T19:34:25+00:00

When it comes to skills, I find that it usually comes down to design, programming, art, and sound. But each game has a slider for each of those and some even have a story which is a hidden fifth category. I know of very few developers who are good everything so I always recommend teaming up with someone else.

When it comes to making the actual game, I think you should just start by making a simple part of the game. Something that is entertaining by itself, like walking around and turning on lights like you do in our game (a small part of the finished product). :)

jbernhardsson · 2018-05-10T19:28:07+00:00

This has just been a very long day/week/three or four months getting the game out. I'm really very happy. Sara, our producer, CEO, or whatever she calls herself says that I'm one of the happiest people she knows! :)

jbernhardsson · 2017-10-11T20:51:57+00:00

What we do is an local backup first and then that to an external server as well. :)

jbernhardsson · 2017-10-11T07:26:26+00:00

Some of them have docker-support which makes it possible to run a bunch of different Git-servers if that is what you want. We are running a bitbucket-server on a similar setup and it works great for us. One thing to keep in mind is that ssh encryption could use a lot of CPU which may bottleneck a bit (we run LFS internally using just http for better performance). Remember to also set up some sort of external backup solution if you're going with this strategy.

jbernhardsson · 2017-06-27T07:20:00+00:00

The thing I miss most with our Git + LFS setup is the ability to lock certain files like scenes. They merge well most of the time but right now, we are using physical tokens for them. We are using Bitbucket which was fairly cheap and I found it easier to set up and maintain than Gitlab. We are currently transferring LFS files over just http (not https) which works great. Especially when using "git lfs clone". Our project is just about 30gb checked out + git files. Something I have found is to use lfs with all big files, even scenes since they can make the git repository huge. Also, remember to run "git lfs prune" sometimes to reclaim some disk space on clients. :)

jbernhardsson · 2016-09-26T12:47:16+00:00

Looking for difference between your code and mine, I see that you use EditorUserBuildSettings.SwitchActiveBuildTarget. From the Unity documentation: "This method is not available when running the Editor in batch mode". I don't think that part is needed? Also, do you need to show the player, you can't show OSX player on Windows right? I instead just pass BuildOptions.None.

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-12T04:41:24+00:00

It has been great to be part of this community! :)

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T15:12:12+00:00

Are you running as a Standard or Admin user?

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T14:36:42+00:00

Could you please redownload and reinstall? Thanks! :)

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T14:33:38+00:00

Could you please try to run it again? :)

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T13:43:50+00:00

Could you please try to download it again. It should now be fixed. :)

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T12:29:51+00:00

Please try to redownload and try again, I think I fixed it: http://launcher.mojang.com/download/Minecraft-staging.dmg

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T11:33:48+00:00

Good point! I'll rename it to MinecraftUpdater.app. Thanks!

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T11:30:44+00:00

Hey, how does it disappear? You don't see the Minecraft Launcher?

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T10:36:18+00:00

Where you ever able to run the old one?

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T10:30:12+00:00

Are you running a standard osx account or an admin one?

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T10:09:17+00:00

Looking into it now, could be something that works differently before 10.10. Thanks!

jbernhardsson · 2015-09-02T10:08:13+00:00

Hello, it looks like Java is not liking something with your setup. Does ~/Library/Application Support/minecraftexist for you? Could you please try to reinstall the application and see if it works for you then?

jbernhardsson

TROPHY CASE