Under lång tid var Stamp" eller"Stampylonghea" ett av de mest populära namnen i Minecraft-världen, en brittisk Youtubare känd för att skapa innehåll som passar alla åldrar och målgrupper i Mojangs Minecraft. Stampy har sedan dess tagit ett steg tillbaka från Youtube för att i stället satsa på en ny karriär inom spelutveckling. Idag arbetar han som producent hos 4J Studios i Skottland, där Minecraft- och Hypixel-utmanaren Reforj just nu är under utveckling.
Under vårt senaste besök på London Games Fest och evenemanget New Game Plus fick vi möjlighet att prata med Joe "Stampy" Garrett om Reforj och de enorma ambitionerna. Med det i åtanke frågade vi hur teamet hanterar att tygla sig självt och kanske lägga mer udda eller galna idéer åt sidan för att i stället fokusera på kärnelementen. Det korta svaret är att utvecklingsteamet inte gör det, utan låter kreativiteten flöda fritt:
"I don't think we do very well. Like, we know we have the long-term plan. We know there's some big things we want to have, like vehicles. The engine's really good at vehicles. We have vehicles in the engine. They're not in the game yet, but they were in kind of previous demos that were created. So we know what we're going to have. We know we're going to have gateways with these big tentpole things. We know we're working towards them. But in terms of the smaller things, or things we can implement a little bit more quickly, like new mobs or new quality of life features, we're really fast to adapt to that.
You know, because we're listening to the community so much, any little suggestions or like... 'add furniture or things', I know I'm saying little suggestions and the rest of the team is probably watching this, like I worked two months on that! You know, things that are a little bit easier to implement than things like vehicles. We're very agile and so we can add that stuff quite quickly. We have the big picture, we know the world and we have kind of that line. But in terms of the little smaller parts that we're taking, we're purposefully not locking ourselves down too much. If we spend months and months working on a thing, and then we show it to the community, and they're not interested in it, or they say, 'oh, it could have been like this', we've just wasted loads of time, right?
So we're literally sharing, you know, if we're working on a mob, we're showing it in gray box stage, or we're showing concept art, and we're getting feedback then before a load of animators are animating it or adding sounds to it. So that's kind of the way we're trying to develop, and it seems to be working."
Du kan se hela intervjun med Garrett nedan. Reforj är fortfarande under utveckling och teamet söker fortsatt feedback från communityn för att forma dess riktning och framtidsplaner.
