Building the 'Minecraft' Creator Platform Block-by-Block

[Music] how's everyone doing today everybody had a good GDC welcome to the closing keynote of GDC yall made it congratulations uh I'm Kayla uh I work on Minecraft uh just a reminder to silence your phones uh and also look out for a survey after this talk I know you've probably been reminded about this a million times uh but when you feel out that survey and you give comments every Speaker gets to see those comments and it really helps us get better at being speakers and it also helps the GDC advisers figure out what y'all want to see so if you want to see more content like this fill out the survey if you don't want to see more content like this fill out the survey all right uh so we're going to cover a bunch of stuff today uh we're going to start with kind of giving a background about Minecraft uh where it is how we kind of think about it uh how we think about the Creator ecosystem on Minecraft we're going to spend some time about

uh diving into who is a Creator uh kind of how we think about what a Creator is uh with the different cohorts we see within the Creator Community then we're going to go into a section about challenges uh our approaches to solving those challenges and some takeaways this is kind of focusing on the last few years and then the last uh agenda item is the most important one uh we're going to close this GDC with the loudest Applause that any crowd uh has made this week so get ready for that one uh if you have to report back to your boss uh and give like just a summary of what you learned here at GDC this is your slide so please grab this one here um we're going to check back again at the at the end of the presentation to see how we did here uh but the first thing is that creators will do things that you never expected so you should really understand how you're going to deal with this the second is that the community will contribute significantly so you should really understand what they can and can't to do uh without your help and the third thing is that you should really think about the entire life cycle of player and Creator uh and how you can uh

meet their changing needs a bit about me uh I've been on Minecraft now for almost four years I've been at Microsoft for just over seven but been making games for well over 20 years now um I really believe strongly that games are important uh games have been really important for me I think games are important for the world for the culture that we that we build uh and as such like I think everyone should play games uh and when they play games they should see themselves in the games they play but more than that I really believe that everyone should make games um you know they should have access to be able to express themselves in this medium I don't think everyone's going to be a great game maker but at least they should have access to be able to to try that and and uh Express themselves and in my career I've seen a lot of this access improving we've kind of seen this uh continual evolution of democratization of development and distribution you know it used to be that uh there were proprietary game engines really complex code bases physical

distribution this put a lot of power with Studios and Publishers and it meant that very few voices could actually get their games out there in front of an audience but then we saw better development tools evolve better middleware more accessible tools uh digital distribution really enabled a lot more voices to come out uh and start expressing themselves through this medium Minecraft was really a product of this era and allowed uh Minecraft to kind of uh get out there and I think that we're entering a new era in gaming uh where creators today can start using games as platforms to start expressing themselves in new and more approachable ways you know creators don't have to start by making an entirely new game they can start by modding a game or just changing a few things learning and iterating as they go kind of really dramatically increasing that accessibility but also games that have Discovery platforms within them make it easier for those creators to get those experiences out to uh players who are already primed to like experiences that are very similar to those games so it's easier for creators to get that engaged

audience another big takeaway here is uh these creators are really worth paying attention to and something I've been talking a lot about at this GDC is how this industry needs to pay more attention to what's happening in this Creator space these creators are really talented uh they're really Innovative uh they deserve our respect and our acknowledgement from our industry uh they're really the next generation of innovators that I see yay ever improving access it's great all right uh so let's kind of talk about Minecraft uh so if you haven't heard about Minecraft it's pretty popular um it's not too late to get started Minecraft can be your craft too um thank you I practiced that joke before this landed better in here okay um so this year is the 15 year anniversary of Minecraft um and with over 300 million copies sold it's you know one of the best selling video games of all time um show of hands who here plays on Java who here plays on bedrock

who here has no idea okay who here came for another craft talk like Starcraft or Warcraft or run craft okay good you're all the right runes this is good um so what's really amazing about Minecraft is creativity is at its core um you know it really makes it a perfect Creator platform game uh because playing you know creating is just a natural extension of playing you know players are kind of primed to be creators um which is great you kind of we're kind of training the Next Generation just by playing Minecraft uh Minecraft has a lot of versions uh And to clarify this talk is really going to focus on what we call the Bedrock version of Minecraft uh you Java folks may want to leave I don't know um uh but uh Bedrock is the multiplatform version of Minecraft which is playable on PC consoles and mobile devices um but before we talk about that let's talk about Java um Java is the original version of Minecraft uh and it has a super strong history of modding uh this is a very open community-driven thing and we've seen unbelievable creativity from these folks creators here have made

everything from simple mods to entirely new types of games we've seen them completely change their rendering Tech stack it's kind of ridiculous what they've done over here um and certainly you know we provide some supported ways for creators to build on top of java uh but it's also really fair to say that one of the main reasons so much creativity is possible here is Java decompiles pretty easily um and because of that decompiling uh part of java Community projects like bucket spigot uh Forge they've been able to provide the scaffolding that have allowed Community projects to build on top of it um Bedrock is a bit different uh it's a C++ code base uh it's a little bit harder for communities to get started here uh C++ doesn't decompile very easily which is which is good um uh we sh on closed platforms like consoles uh and a big part of Bedrock is we want to make sure that all players are always playing on the same client version so that all players can play with each other at all times uh so what's really important about bedrocks if we want to see the same level of creativity on bedrock that we see on Java uh we need to be really

intentional with how we allow that and we have been doing just that uh for quite some time now uh back in 2016 we started by allowing for simple retexturing of mobs tweaking of attributes uh and in 2017 we launched our Marketplace which opened up to allowing creators to distribute their creations and get them in front of our players and since then we've added more capabilities like custom entities mobs NPCs custom blocks custom items we've launched a learning portal which is where we've centralized knowledge and learning about our platform we've launched a full crater API which has provided dramatic Improvement in game logic capability and professional development environments and we're working on an editor right now which improves visual workflows uh for for helping creators create but we're certainly not done I'm very excited about all the other things we have in the pipeline 2024 is turning to be pretty great already and and lots more great stuff is in store but why do we do this why do we care on Bedrock about craters uh what we

find is that crater content uh really contributes significantly to the overall engagement that we see on Bedrock uh what we see is that when we can match players with Creator content that they love uh this deepens their play with Minecraft so it's really all about driving deeper love deeper engagement with Minecraft and creater content fuel that does that and one of the ways that we connect our players with our creators uh is through the marketplace so Marketplace is accessible from the main menu in Minecraft uh it has premium placement for all of our players on all platforms uh creators are able to join the program uh and we have really talented uh content review teams checking all the content before we publish uh we have hundreds of professional creators it's part of a Marketplace program they've created an incredible breadth of experiences uh and collectively have gotten billions and billions of downloads much like McDonald's I guess uh anyway um the types of experiences we see here are like texture packs uh like true realism

HD by pathway Studios uh we have original game experiences original Ip uh like spell run by game mode one represent game mode one um we have uh IP partnership experiences uh uh like the Dungeons and Dragons map that we worked with ever Bloom Studios on um all kinds of great stuff uh we also just launched a new content category in the marketplace uh this is called add-ons uh these kind of give Bedrock players a very mod likee experience uh they're stackable they let players kind of mix and match and combine them together to create their own game experience players can apply these to existing worlds or new worlds uh and they're really quite quite amazing uh they just launched February 20th uh they've already been a huge hit with players and we're already completely blown away by the creativity uh of our community of creators speaking of creators who are they and what are the cohorts that we see within them uh so again Minecraft is a game about creativity everyone's a creator that's easy um you know we do we

do actually make a distinction between player and Creator um and so it's we we do kind of think about that a bit um so like a player you know they generally play Within the rules and Bounds of the game so whether they're playing in survival mode or creative mode uh players play using objects that are part of the game world and are in lore or vanilla um as we say so you know while you can get a lot of really complex redstone blocks in Minecraft and you can build really complex machines and Contraptions in Minecraft those redstone blocks are part of the vanilla lore and they're part of the game world so we consider players who are creative with those still very much of that player cohort but we do have another category of in uh in-game object uh that require cheat codes uh and commands to get access to these are things like command blocks and structure blocks and when players start playing with those we start seeing them kind of start the the first early steps of becoming a real Creator because with playing with those they're starting to like push the edges

of what Minecraft is and start kind of like figuring out how they can kind of change the world uh a bit themselves their Journey continues with out of game editing so they could be editing assets they can be editing Json files they could be uh writing JavaScript files obviously when when they start uh editing with external things they're clearly on the Creator side of the spectrum here um but one of the clearest actions that we see creators do uh is in sharing their Creation with someone else um so again while you know the player Creator divide is certainly fuzzy in a game like Minecraft there are certain actions that we can look at to kind of cohor them and and figure out who's doing what so another thing we look at this is is from this crater Journey uh pipeline so on-ramps into Creator um are almost always players uh people you know creators join our creator program U because they love Minecraft because they grew up playing the game uh just because they love the game uh and so onramps into kind of what we call Creator are

either players or sometimes education players so players obviously build in their own Minecraft world education players are um maybe learning coding uh but at some point they they kind of break out of that player um activity and join um the Creator Journey um so like we said before player creators can be those that just start playing with command blocks or structure blocks uh our player Creator cohort size here is measured in the millions uh these are creators that are just making cool things to themselves they want to see what they can do they're curious maybe they want to share it with a friend or two but really they're motivated by that sense of personal discovery that they just want to try and see what they can do to the game uh in their own in their own way they stick with us for for longer uh they may graduate into a hobbyist Creator uh cohort uh this cohort we measure in the tens of thousands uh and is really about these um creators that have kind of increased their intensity with our our platform they've generally joined community um they're sharing within those

communities they're spending a lot more of their time with our platform they're really motivated by personal skill development and developing status within the communities that they're part of now what's really interesting here is we've talked about millions and tens of thousands of creators here but none of these creators are actually motivated by money money is not at the heart of why these creators create it really starts from that love of Minecraft and it starts from that Joy of creation so when we engage with this audience it's all about how can we tap into that intrinsic love of of creation and make that creation as joyful as possible but at some point creators May develop their skills to a point where they want to start making a gig out of it and we call this cohort the professional creators uh this is when they've developed their skills and they start wanting to to make some money from that maybe they want to use it as supplemental income maybe they want to do this work full-time maybe they want to create a studio and hire a bunch of other creators to work with them uh but at this at this point their motivation really changes and they now want to make m content to try to run their business

and this is something we take really seriously because these folks have now bet uh themselves and they bet their livelihood on our platform so we really want to make sure that we're trying to ensure a good business outcome for them here uh this is like we talked before there like hundreds uh hundreds of folks that are in in our Marketplace program uh what's important here is the arrow keeps going um every single person that's on a crater journey is a human being and a person um and while I would love to think that everybody is going to create on Minecraft Forever and Always and only create on Minecraft uh that's obviously not true uh at some point people are going to want to do other things in life um and so I think a lot about how uh how we can instill skills and development for each individual so that when they go off and do their next thing uh we've kind of left them a little bit better off and they're a little more successful in the next thing they want to do in their life all right so that's a little bit academic so let's actually meet a real Creator uh this is jagar bav uh his real name is Tim but we call him jig um he

started as a Minecraft player he loved Minecraft um and he had a kind of a dream where he always wanted to make games uh he didn't think he ever could he was working in a different industry um but he tinkered around and just kind of wanted to see what he could make inside of Minecraft in his spare time for many years he was a hobbyist uh he made mods and experiences in Minecraft Java and he was pretty good at it you know he made over 15 different free maps he got over 2 million downloads but the problem is he really couldn't turn this into anything more than a hobby and he was getting kind of sad with how much time it was taking him to do all this work um when I asked him kind of you know what was some of the limitations here um he found that uh backwards compatibility was a huge challenge for him in the Java Community um because a lot of the Java modding Community is a bit ad hoc it's hard for us on Minecraft to kind of support those mods over time and so he found that his maps and content would break from release to release he found himself spending a lot of time remaking his content every single time the new

release came out um he had found a really hard time reaching players you know there is no central place on Java for players to find content and so it was hard for him to build an audience um and the fact that it was hard for him you know there was no real way for him to earn income made sure that this was always just going to be a hobby for him and not something full-time so he thought this would just be forever a hobby and nothing more uh jig was actually one of the first partners that we approached to join the marketplace program uh back in 2017 uh and he was able to build some pretty incredible experiences um he grew his catalog over time grew growing his downloads and eventually got to the point where he was able to do this work full-time um heck he was able even to hire a full team to work with him um he was you know he's released over 25 free maps over 28 paid Maps he's gotten over 50 million downloads um when I asked him you know what made this possible he talks about backwards compatibility being a thing that we solved for uh at least mostly on Bedrock uh this made it

easier for him to have kind of safe progress so he could build a map and then build onto it over time and not have to worry about redoing work over and over again you know the marketplace uh allowed access to all players on all platforms to find his content it was much a much larger player pool for him to access and he was able to build an audience uh and of course you can't go pro without income uh and so the income that the marketplace provided uh allowed him to actually you know quit his uh his day job and just do this work full time today jigs team has a number of great experiences in our Marketplace uh these are just a few of my favorites uh Marketplace Creator Tycoon is this really weird meta experience about what it's life to be a Creator on the Minecraft uh MRA Marketplace think like Game Dev Story But in Minecraft um Suburbia is another one of my f f my faves uh it's a citybuilding game in Minecraft uh I'm a sucker for citybuilding games so this is right at my alley and then computers just launched with our add-ons launch um it's

an add-on that asks the question so Minecraft but with computers I would definitely recommend checking that one out um jig's story isn't unique uh we have hundreds and more stories from our other creators um what's important is that this journey from player to hobbyist to Creator isn't just academic uh it's something that we see for real Z's we see this time and time again um and the challenges that jig experienced as a hobbyist early on are some of the the challenges that we uh wanted to address uh directly when we first started the marketplace program uh and really allowed a lot of these creators uh to get their initial success all right that's our background now we're going to go into more more recent stuff here um so this next section is going to talk about how we evolved the platform over the last few years uh to address some of the new challenges that have been cropping up so back when I joined in the summer of 2020 um we had done a survey with creators to get a sense of where we were at the platform and you know what did we

need to do going forward we heard three big things first we heard that Creator experiences were getting fragile so creators were starting to rely on really convoluted workarounds to achieve their creative Ambitions and these weren't really stable solutions that we had ant anticipated so they were a lot more prone to Breaking between Minecraft releases we're also hearing that uh their workflows were getting more challenging so as Ambitions grew the way creators were working wasn't scaling uh and the workarounds were getting more convoluted and cumbersome and the third thing we heard uh was just that documentation was really poor we weren't doing a good job of maintaining documentation on our platform or really teaching creators how to use it so in order for our platform to take it to the next level uh we really needed to work on solving these things uh the way my team works is we kind of split how we support creators across these kind of three pillars uh the first pillar is features and this is all about enabling more capabilities and functionality that allows creators to be more

expressive and and do more things uh the second pillar is tooling uh which is all about improved workflows and tools that both make our platform more approachable uh but also make our our creators uh more effective in how they work uh and the third is all about Community uh and this is all about fostering the community of creators that we have out there and helping them learn and grow um as they continue their creator journey and what's important is that when we do this work we're not just focusing on the marketplace creators that are making money on our platform but we focus on our entire community of creators uh wherever they are on our creator Journey uh another thing to kind of ground Us in before we continue is what we think of is of what we think of a Minecraft Bedrock experience and what's in it um so ultimately you can kind of look at a Bedrock creater experiences as this kind of collection of entities blocks and items we have a game logic layer that controls how all these elements work together and interact with the player at the bottom of the stack we have World gen uh which could be like

vanilla worlds generated from seeds or it could be just an empty world uh that is ready for creators to um uh paint and do their own thing with and then scene layout um is where all the blocks entities and items get placed and kind of aligned in the world uh we'll revisit this map as we go just to kind of uh Orient yourself on kind of where where on the Tex stock we're kind of talking all right let's talk about features and some of the challenges here I love this quote uh uh creators told us a lot of development feels like weird hacks hacks is such a Negative term for now I'm going to call it creative platform workarounds that's what we're going to call it so the first creative platform workaround um so creators often felt that they had to mix and match various components to get what they wanted to do like there was no direct A to B path to kind of do what they wanted to do um and maybe it worked uh but if it did it wasn't really in a way that we had expected it so it may not work from release to release um over time these

creative workarounds started becoming standard practices within our creator Community um and this was just starting to add up and slowing down creators and again you know we never expected this um so we had no way to uh test for these things or prepare for these things uh and so it was much harder for us to kind of react um as these things started coming up one my favorite examples of a creative workaround is Cinematic experiences um so a lot of of our Minecraft creators wanted to create these like cinematic moments in their Maps they wanted to have like a swooping camera and like a nice setup shot uh to kind of introduce a player to what's going on but we never shipped a camera system for them to do that so how would they do it well we have a teleport command and so if they just teleport a player they can kind of make it look like you're you're you're having a new camera from a new location and we let Comm cam we let commands fire 20 times a second so if you just fire a teleport command 20 times over you can get like 1

second of footage out of that and if you add a few more hacks like removing the HUD uh removing player input well by golly with enough commands you could make a camera out of this and here's a great example of that um you know this is the Avatar Legends map made by our good friends at game mode one up front here uh it's a very cinematic IP uh so it really makes sense to have a cinematic setup like this um so you know I have this this beautiful uh swooping shot of the air Temple and behind the scenes you have these thousands upon thousands of teleportation commands going driving this it's really horrific but it's amaz it's amazing it's an amazing video shot uh and it's so cool um you know know and let me be clear like this doesn't make this experience bad at all um you know pushing the boundaries of our platform that's what creators do uh and really talented creators like game mode one they know how to do this in a smart way and they know how to do it well um but you know definitely this is not what we had in mind mind when we gave creators a

teleportation command and the ability to fire a command I didn't think that they were going to you know build us 5,000 command sequence to build a swooping thing it's amazing okay um yeah I think we can do better to support them uh and in this case we decided to prioritize some features that could provide a more supported more performant and easier way to manipulate the camera so a few features here uh first was proper cameras um so we now allow to set up these custom cameras that are detached from the player uh it includes features like easing and fading kind of the things you would expect from a camera we also added a um a HUD command that allows them to hide HUD elements uh to make the the kind of screen a little bit more cinematic um and then also input locking so they can lock player input so that during the Cinematic sequence the player can't just run around and get in the way of what's going on uh so here's just a quick little example that I I shot before I came to GDC so in this world I have uh four different command

blocks down uh the First Command Block I have the HUD hide command or I'm just kind of going to hide all the HUD elements uh the second command block I'm going to fire um all me disabling player movement um the third command block here is just going to fade uh the the camera out um so kind of get in this beautiful kind of CTIC mode and then the fourth command here is going to trigger another C uh camera and have it kind of um ease between those things so if I hit hit this button you can see this all all fire here really beautiful cinematic um so not only does this make cameras more performant and capable for professionals but it also opens up this feature to significantly more creators so now if you want to make a camera uh in your game you don't have to have the technical knowhow of you know triggering thousands upon thousands of of commands together um this is much easier you know four commands uh fire really easy here you can just throw them into command blocks it's really easy um but also these features also open up not just cinematic cameras but they open up the

possibility for new genres of gameplay in Marketplace Maps so we're kind of opening up the types of things that creators can make all right so let's get back to that visual of what's in a Minecraft experience we're going to focus on that middle bit the entities blocks and items bit um those are all defined through Json files uh and we actually ship all of the vanilla entity Json files as examples so you can just go to GitHub you can download those uh you can see them um in your uh install folder so if you actually want to edit like the creeper guy here uh you totally can um creators are able to learn uh what we built uh or they can customize these in their own experience or they can just make entirely new uh blocks items or entities uh entities were the first thing that we data drove um and they started out really simple you know here's Creeper Guy uh. Json you know edit the blast radius value um but over time complexity started creeping in uh we started getting goals behaviors animation controllers complex event firing um and while Json files started

simple with dozens of lines they started ballooning into thousands upon thousands of lines of complexity and it was getting incredibly hard to debug as a Creator meanwhile uh at another part of the stack we were also increasing capability uh for driving game logic so a few command blocks started growing to hundreds simple MC function files which are just sequences of commands uh we're growing to thousands upon thousands of commands like that cinematic camera example earlier um you know simple triggers in in entities were growing into complex State machines firing commands and triggering logic uh things were getting pretty out of hand uh one of my favorite things to do around this time was to bring one of our talented creators in and have them sit down and show our developers kind of what they're doing and watch the developer face just go completely white um you know it's it's obviously amazing what creators are able to do uh with our platform um but you know things shouldn't be this hard uh we should be able to make things easier for everyone uh so one thing we've been

investing in for a long time now um is what we call our creator API uh and the purpose of this is to provide a robust scalable and professional game logic platform uh it allows creators to use professional tools like VSS code uh and though and these professional tools along with like JavaScript and typescript workflows allow for significantly more complexity uh that can be much more easily managed um our apis are being built from the ground depth to be a lot more resilient uh and a lot uh have a lot more internal testing around them uh and we have with those apis a lot stricter contracts with creators uh which basically just means that it's harder for creators to use them in ways that we didn't uh intend so previously Bedrock game logic could look a lot like a rub Goldberg machine with many objects trying to trigger other objects to eventually do what the Creator had intended in the first place scripting really aims to provide a much more clean direct approach uh and a much more complete API layer uh this allows for uh make makes it easier to profile makes faster iteration and just you know better for

everyone involved uh we're also extending these apis to allow for object scope scripting so not just game logic but scripting um on individual game objects so now each block and item uh can have its own static definition file through Json but also a whole host of dynamic logic through scripting uh we call this custom components um logic here can be streamlined it can be reusable between objects it's easier to build for it's easier to tool for uh and it's going to allow for much more complex blocks and items this is really us learning from the challenges of building up capability in entities and trying to do it better and in a more scalable way for blocks and items so some takeaways on features here uh creators are going to do things that you never expected uh and they're going to find workarounds to your platform limitations so it's really important to think about uh how you're going to handle that um the tools at your disposal you could always hard block certain patterns patters that creators are doing you can do this via content

validation that's certainly one approach uh you could document things and just tell them please don't do this uh or give them just some some soft uh errors in the game uh but ultimately the most important thing is if creators are pushing on your platform it means they're trying to do something and the best thing to do is just ship the right feature so that they can actually do the things they want to do all right let's switch gears and talk about tooling here uh quote from the creators if we could just work in Bedrock that'd be great this might be a very confusing sentence for people to read if you're not familiar with what happens on Bedrock um so let me explain um so Minecraft uh the kind of ethos of Minecraft is you build one block at a time this is great as a player it's a really great game design Loop um it's not super helpful when you're a Creator and you're trying to build a multi- thousand hundred of thousand Block world one block at a time would take you bloody forever uh and you would never be able to ship your world um so you kind of need tools in order to

uh edit large scale worlds now normally when you're a game and you want to support a modern Community uh you would start with some internal tools you know use what your internal developers are using find a way to ship them to creators um but the problem with Minecraft is there are no internal tools that we use you know we don't hand paint mountains in Minecraft they're all seed generated we don't kind of hand Place uh entities in the world they're algorithmically placed um so we don't do any of that stuff but our creators do and so they need tools in order to solve for that and again the Java Community they solved for this years ago uh they built up a whole bunch of editing tools over there things like world edit foxal sniper MC edit um all these great great tools uh we knew that uh we had nothing on Bedrock um and that our creators were going to need something to work with so we partnered with The Hive on a tool called chunker uh which is a web tool that converts Java and Bedrock files uh between each other it's really slick and it's been a key part of our creater

workflow uh this whole time uh our creators today wouldn't be able to ship those amazing Bedrock Maps uh without being able to um make them first in Java and then convert them over to over uh using chunker but converting between jav and Bedrock certainly has problems uh they are two very different games uh and have very different file formats uh it can be very cumbersome to have this conversion step uh and ultimately we just need to solve the problem of Bedrock not having a great set of tools for creators so we've been working on that um our editor work here is really all about addressing that challenge of multi-block editing on Bedrock uh this editor is built in engine so as our game evolves the editor uh kind of works in lock step with it it ships with the game as well so every player that has a a copy of Minecraft has a copy of the editor um it also makes makes sure that uh as creators are editing in in this editor it's accurate to what the edine would would naturally see in the end uh the work here on this editor is foundational um I hope that uh after we kind of solve

for multiblock editing we can build up more tools over time to really expand out what visual tooling looks like uh in Bedrock but we also know we can't make every tool that the community might ask for so a major part of this initiative is also what we call the extensions API and the idea here is to allow the community to build tools on top of our foundation uh so we aim to kind of provide this gravitational pull to kind of focus the community so we can all kind of align efforts and kind of move Bedrock tooling forward together that certainly doesn't mean we say goodbye to chunker uh we still want creators to have the flexibility to create where they want to create using the tools they want to use if they're comfortable with workflows on Java then great I want them to keep doing that uh and ultimately we want we want to bridge the Java and Bedrock communities wherever we can so we're currently working with the hive uh to open source uh chunker uh so that we can kind of further strength strengthen that tool kind of bring more of the community into it Empower more of the community and as

part of this we're also looking at how we would integrate chunker functionality into our editor so that you could like edit in the editor and output uh into Bedrock or or or Java from there so we're going to kind to go talk about different tools uh we'll talk about kind of tooling for editor for entities blocks and items here um this is like 3D modeling stuff uh the blocky pixelated style of Minecraft really doesn't lend itself to traditional industry tools like blender um but thankfully an amazing Community tool just kind of emerged as the standard here um so this is uh blockbench uh it's made by a really talented Creator named Yannis um everybody that makes Minecraft content uses blockbench it is by far the most Community standard tool here um so instead of us trying to build our own tool we just decided to reach out to jannis and ask how we can help uh and so we just partnered with him uh blockbench is a free it's an open source project um we help support the project we work

with Yannis on the road map uh we all kind of collaborate on on where we need to take it um some things that have been really important to us is how we improve the approachability of this tool so we worked with Giannis on Wizards to kind of get make it easier for entities blocks and items to get built uh by even uh more earlier in the funnel creators all right so let's summ summarize tooling here uh the community is a great resource and even without your help passionate Talent people are going to find a way uh but there's definitely going to be places where the community can't move forward on their own so things to consider you know where do you want to invest to unblock the community so things like uh chunker or the editor work that we're doing uh how can you create a gravitational pull and focus the community efforts you know things like uh the editor extension apis that we're doing uh and where can you accelerate areas uh things like our our partnership with blockbench all right we're getting there all right the community bucket let's talk about the challenge here so the

quote from the creators here is there is no source of Truth we rely on institutional knowledge um so one of the challenges that we faced back in 2020 was there really was no good source of Truth on how to use our platform uh Creator teams were building and maintaining their own um knowledge sets which wasn't really great uh back then we did actually ship documentation but it was static uh and it was extracted from game builds uh it was very rudimentary reference documentation and certainly wasn't like higher order guides or or tutorials um the community back then did pull all these files from every single game build that we released and they put them up on their own site like bedrock.la for them um and it really gave the impression that Mojang was listening because we weren't we had no real way of listening to them or

communicating with them at the time so we knew that we had to take documentation seriously um but we also didn't want to stomp over everything that the community was doing um so we started by talking with them and asking where our value ad could be here and in 2021 we launched our learning portal to centralize reference documentation and learning material um open sourcing this was a huge deal for us uh that way we could solve this kind of two-way communication thing with the community and they do and the community does communicate with us here they commit um poll requests they submit issues um they help us keep this document uh these documents clean uh fresh uh and accurate uh and as our own kind of audience has grown with the learning portal uh we haven't seen Community portals kind of drop off either those uh sites have continue to grow as well uh because now we're providing that kind of foundational Bedrock of documentation uh these other community sites uh can kind

of build on top of that all right uh Community engagement so the Minecraft Community is definitely the heartbeat of the franchise um so let's talk about how we have been intentionally building with our community here um one thing we aim from a team perspective is to be ruthlessly iterative we want to get things out there to creators we want to iterate rapidly uh and thankfully we have a number of really great systems in place to help us with this uh we have this concept of preview builds um they're available on most platforms that we ship on uh they're released weekly and they give us really good way to kind of get simple things out there and test stability with them those preview builds are released weekly and they work towards our monthly stable releases and those monthly stable releases allow us to kind of constantly be delivering value to our creators at a really good Cadence uh we also have this concept of experimental Flags in Minecraft uh so if we have a feature that we want to work on for a longer period of time we can put that feature behind the experimental flag uh kind of have an open

conversation with the community with what it is what we're intending with it uh and we can kind of have that more transparency with them in a way that we're not kind of locking ourselves into backwards compatibility so while it's behind experimental uh we can let everybody play with it but we don't promise any sort of backwards compatibility once we're all happy with with the functionality of of that feature we can then remove it from the experimental toggle and then we have the backwards compatibility promise a big part of iteration is also communication um and we have really close communication with our Marketplace Partners we have a private Forum with them uh they're on our slack with us uh we have quarterly calls with them and we have so many surveys like they are so sick of the surveys that we send them like sometimes sometimes we'll do a community call and we'll have a question at the very end of like how many surveys we sent them in that one call and sometimes it's more than four um but it's important it's important for

us to hear uh things um and we get really good participation with the surveys um our private our professional creators also vote on features they submit feature requests they vote on them they add comments to them uh and all this directly impacts our backlog and the stuff that we work on and while I love our professional creators um I really love our hobbyist creators out in the open and wherever possible I really want to communicate in the open with the broader Community uh as much as possible um we go where the creators are uh to their own communities on Discord um I'm in there all the time especially on preview days where I want to get feedback on what we released um and I'm always just kind of chatting with them getting feedback on on what we're doing we also have a number of GitHub repos where we uh iterate with them on samples and documentation and just gather feedback as we go from a culture perspective uh I encourage anyone on the team internally to engage directly with creators and many of our developers do chat on Discord with our creators I think it's really valuable for as many people as possible on the team to really

build that customer empathy and get direct feedback on what we're building and we're actively working with our community on a few major Investments right now uh and getting their feedback and iterating in the open some examples of this are our crator API uh here what we'll do is we'll release beta apis we'll iterate with the community for a few months then stabilize uh we're iterating on graphics features right now with the community we're itly building up these graphics features getting feedback on how they want us to dat to drive it um and on editor where they're giving feedback on what um workflows and tools uh things that they want want next um and we're kind of prioritizing that all right some tips on community engagement so Minecraft obviously has a history of iterating in the open with the community we're just trying to follow uh in that that tradition um so any feature that we're working on uh I want to get that at public as soon as possible so I can build that out in the open the last thing I want to do is build build something uh finish it release it out there and realize that's

not what anybody wanted um so we're always out there Gathering feedback getting ideas from the community but it's also important that internally all decisions are made uh from experts internally who understand kind of what the long-term supportability of our game are like so things to keep in mind one be transparent engage in dialogue with the community um two you know make the community feel heard um even if you can't always deliver what they want um three this is the most important rule um don't promise things unless you're 100% confident uh don't feed the hype train until you really know what you're what you're delivering uh human Psychology 101 is that that loss is felt significantly greater than gain um and every promise is a chance to break a promise uh so just be very very careful uh in in promising things all right we're at the tldr takeaway slide how did we do creators will do things near under under you never expect it understand how you'll handle this over time remember you can

do things like hard block certain patterns like um like validation you can you know document or error nudge But ultimately what creators want you to do is deliver the capability they need two you know you don't need to build everything yourself uh for tooling uh or anything uh the community will do a lot of work uh so focus on blocking the community and helping Focus their efforts and three uh you know think about the Creator life cycle Creator needs will change throughout their life cycle so think about that transition from player player Creator to hobbyist to professional uh and how you can set them up for future success in their lives you know we're certainly not done like all great Minecraft Builds this is absolutely a work in progress um I don't think will ever be done um but as we place each block we ask ourselves is our platform getting more capable meaning can our creators better Express themselves is our platform getting easier to use can creators get started and can each Creator do more is our community getting healthier are we addressing what they need and are

they being heard if so then we're building towards a world where everyone can be a Creator because that next great Creator could come from anywhere thank you y'all did good on the Applause bit that was good that was the most important uh agenda item so Kudos uh we still plenty of time for questions so if anybody has questions I'm happy to take them uh so thanks for good talk so my question is is there any plan to support other popular uh coding languages next pass on cuz uh allow most of the child the Lear to uh coding impath in mcraft

with the book as developed by pel so and P yeah good question the question was about any plans to support other languages uh we chose JavaScript um because it is one of the more widely used languages and we were really focusing on professional workflows at the time so that is why we chose that one um we have nothing really to announce about other uh language choices but I do think there's some interesting intersection with how we could possibly teach uh programming languages in the education version and how that might better translate into creators over time nothing that that I have concrete right now but it's something I definitely think about so it's a really good really good question thank you you nice well if that's it then thank you all very much and have a great rest of your

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