How's everyone doing today? Everybody had a good G DC. Welcome to the closing keynote of G DC. Y'all 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 fill 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 G DC advisors 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 gonna cover a bunch of stuff today. Uh We're gonna 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 gonna spend some time about uh diving into who is a creator. Uh kind of how we think about what a crater
is uh with the different cohorts we see within the creator community. Then we're gonna 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. We're going to close this G DC 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 and give like just a summary of what you learned here at
GDC. This is your slide. So please grab this one here. We're going to check back again at the, at the end of the presentation to see how we did here. But the first thing is that creators will do things that you never expected. So you should really understand and 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 do without your help. And the third thing is that you should really think about the entire life cycle of player and creator
and how you can meet their changing needs. A bit about me. I've been on minecraft now for almost four years. I've been at Microsoft for just over seven. I've been making games for well over 20 years now. I really believe strongly that games are important. Games have been really important for me. I think games are important for the world, for the culture that we, that we build and as such, like, I think everyone should play games 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 gonna 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 continual evolution of democratization of development and distribution. You know, it used to be that uh there are 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 and in front of an audience. But then we saw better development tools evolve, better middleware, more accessible tools, digital distribution really enabled a lot more voices to come out and start expressing themselves through this medium. Minecraft was really a product of this era and allowed Minecraft to kind of get out there. And I think that we're entering a new era in gaming where creators today can start using games as platforms to start expressing themselves in new and
more approachable ways. You know, creators won'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 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 craters are really worth paying
attention to and something I've been talking a lot about at this G DC is how this industry needs to pay more attention to what's happening in this creator space. Uh These creators are really talented, uh They're really innovative. Uh They deserve our respect and our acknowledgment from our industry. Uh They really are 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. Uh Minecraft
can be your craft too. A thank you. I practiced that joke before this landed better in here. OK. 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. OK. Who here came for another craft, talk like Starcraft or Warcraft or room craft good. You're all in the right room. 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 and to clarify this talk is we're going to focus on what we call the Bedrock version of Minecraft. Uh Java folks may want to leave, I don't know. Um uh But
uh Bedrock is the multi platform version of Minecraft, which is playable on PC consoles and mobile devices. Um But before we talk about that, let's talk about Java. 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 the 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, but it's also really fair to say that one of the main reasons so much creativity is possible here is Java decom Ples pretty easily. Um And because of that decom pling 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 de compile very easily, which is, which is good. Um uh We sh on closed platforms like consoles 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. So what's really important about bedrock is if we want to see the same level of creativity on bedrock that we see on Java, we need to be really intentional with how we allow that. And we have been doing just that uh for quite some
time. Now, back in 2016, we started by allowing for simple re texturing of mobs, tweaking of attributes. And in 2017, we launched our marketplace which opened up to allowing creators to distribute to their creations and get them in front of our players. And since then we've added more capabilities like custom entities, mobs N PCS, 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 for helping creators create. But we're certainly not done 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 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 a deeper love, deeper engagement with Minecraft and creator content fuel that does that. And one of the ways that we connect our players with our creators is through the marketplace. So the 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 as
part of our 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 room by game mode one represent game mode one. 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 like 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 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 we we do kind of think about that a bit. Um So like a player, you know, they, 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 the 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 at the edges of what Minecraft is and start like 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 writing javascript files. Obviously, when, when they start editing with external things, they're clearly on the creator side of the
spectrum here. 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 cohort them and, and figure out who's doing what. So another thing we look at this is from this creator journey pipeline. So on ramps into creator um are almost always players. Uh people, you know, creators join our creator program uh because they love Minecraft because they
grew up playing the game. Uh This is because they love the game. Uh And so on ramps into kind of what we call creator are either players or sometimes education players. So players obviously build their own Minecraft world education players are uh 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, a player, craters can be those that just start playing with command blocks or structure blocks. Uh Our player crater cohort size here is measured
in the millions. Uh These are craters that are just making cool things in 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 it is
really about these um its creators that have kind of increased their intensity with our, our platform. They've generally joined communities. 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 craters here, but none of these craters 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 creation and make that creation as joyful as possible. But at some point, creators may develop their skills to a point where they wanna 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 Minecraft content to try to run their business. And this is something we take really seriously because these folks have now bet uh themselves and, 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 it like
hundreds, uh hundreds of folks that are in our, in our marketplace program. What's important here is the arrow keeps going. Every single person that's on a creator 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 gonna wanna 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 wanna do in their life. All right. So that's a little bit academic. So let's actually meet a real creator. Uh This is Jigar BV. 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. Uh, 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. Uh, 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 modern 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 a 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 gonna 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, uh, 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 an 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 like to be a creator on the Minecraft uh market marketplace, think like game Dev story. But in Minecraft, um suburbia is another one of my fa fa my faves. Uh It's a city building game in Minecraft. Uh
I'm a sucker for city building games. So this is right up my alley and the computer is 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 of 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 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 gonna go into more, more recent stuff here. Um So this next section is gonna 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
we had done a survey with creators to get a sense of where we're at with the platform. And you know, what did we need to do going forward? We heard three big things. First, we heard that Crater 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 an anticipated. So they were a lot more prone to breaking between Minecraft releases. We're also hearing that uh their workflows are 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 was that 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. The first pillar is features and this is all about
enabling more capabilities and functionality that allows creators to be more expressive and do more things. The second pillar is tooling which is all about improved workflows and tools that both make our platform more approachable but also make our our creators 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 crater 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 in our platform, but we focus on our, our entire community of creators uh wherever they are on our crater journey. 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 creator 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 world generated from seeds or it could be just an empty world uh that is ready for creators to um uh paint and, 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 tech stack, we're kind of talking. All right, let's talk about
features and some of the challenges here, I love this quote. Uh Creators told us a lot of development feels like weird hacks, hacks is such a negative term for now. I'm gonna call it creative platform workarounds. That's what we're gonna call it. So the first creative platform work around. 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 critics work around, started becoming standard practices within our creator community. Um And this was just starting to add up and slowing down craters. And again, you know, we never expected this. Um So we had no way to test for these things or prepare for these things. And so it was much harder for us to kind of react um as things started coming up, one of my favorite examples of a creative workaround is
cinematic experiences. Um So a lot of our Minecraft creators want to create these like cinematic moments in their maps. They wanted to have like a swooping camera and like a nice set up 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,
we let commands fire 20 times a second. So if you just fire a teleport command 20 times over, you can get like one 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. You know, this is the Avatar Legends map made by our good friends at game mode. One up front here, it's a very cinematic ip. So it really makes sense to have a
cinematic set up like this. So, you know, I have this beautiful 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, it's amazing. It's an amazing video shot and it's so cool. Um You 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 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. But you know, definitely this is not what we had in mind when we gave creators a teleportation command and the ability to fire a command. I didn't think that they were gonna, you know, build this 5000 command sequence to build a swooping thing. It's amazing. OK. 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 first was proper cameras.
So we now allow them to set up these custom cameras that are detached from the player. It includes features like easing and fading, kind of the things that you would expect from a camera. We also added a HUD command that allows them to hide HUD elements 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 shot before I came to G DC. So in this world, I have four different command blocks down. The first command block, I have the Hud Hide command where I'm just kind of going to hide all the HUD elements, the second command block, I'm gonna fire os 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 cinematic mode. And then the fourth command here is gonna trigger another camera and have it kind of 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 in your game, you don't have to have the technical know how of, you know, triggering thousands upon thousands of commands together. This is much easier, you know, four commands, fire it real 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 creator can make. All right. So let's get back to the 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 and we actually ship all of the vanilla entity JSON files as examples. So you can just go to github, you can download
those, you can see them in your install folder. So if you actually want to edit like the Creeper Guy here, you totally can um creators are able to learn uh what we built uh or they customize these in their own experience or they can just make entirely new blocks, items or entities uh entities were the first thing that we data drove and they started out really simple. You know, here's Creeper guy dot Json, you know, edit the blast radius value. Um But over time complexity started creeping in, we started getting goals, behaviors, animation controllers, complex
event firing. And while Jason 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, at another part of the stack, we are also increasing capability for driving game logic. So a few command blocks are growing to hundreds simple MC function files which are just sequences of commands. We're growing to thousands upon thousands of commands like that. Cinematic camera example earlier, you know, simple triggers and 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's 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 VS code. Uh And the and these professional tools along with like javascript and typescript workflows allow for a significantly more complexity uh that can be much more easily managed. Um Our API S are being built from the ground up to be a lot more resilient and a lot have a lot more internal testing around them. And we have with those A
PS a lot stricter contracts with creators, which basically just means that it's harder for creators to use them in ways that we didn't intend. So previously, bedrock game logic could look a lot like a Rube 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 and a much more complete api layer. The philosopher makes it easier profile, makes faster iteration and just, you know, better for everyone involved. We're also extending these A P
is to allow for object scripting. So not just game logic but scripting on individual game objects. So now each block and item 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 and entities and trying to
do it better and in a more scalable way for blocks and items. So some takeaways on features here, creators are going to do things that you never expected and they're going to find workarounds to your platform limitations. So it's really important to think about how you're going to handle that. The tools at your disposal, you could always hard block certain patterns that creators are doing. You can do this via content validation. That's certainly one approach. You could document things and just tell them, please don't do this or give them just some, some soft 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 features 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 1000 100 of 1000 block world one block at a time would take you bloody forever and you would never be able to ship your world. Um So you kind of need tools in order to edit large scale worlds. Now, normally when you're a game and you want to support a modern community, you
would start with some internal tools, you know, use what your internal developers are using, find a way to ship them to creators. 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 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 sold for this years ago, uh They
built up a whole bunch of editing tools over there, things like World Edit Foxl, sniper MC, edit. Um All these great great tools uh We knew that we had nothing on bedrock. Um And that our creators were gonna 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 crater workflow. Uh This whole time. Uh Our creators today wouldn't be able to ship those amazing
bedrock maps uh without being able to uh make them first in Java and then convert them over to over uh using chunker. But converting between jab 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 lockstep with it, it ships with the game as well. So every player that has a copy of Minecraft has a copy of the editor. Um It also makes makes sure that as creators are editing in in this editor, it's accurate to what the engine 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 multi block 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. 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 better off 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 to open source uh chunker so that we can kind of further strengthen, strengthen that tool, kind of bring more of the community into it and 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 into bedrock or, or, or Java from there. So we're gonna 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, the blocky pixelated style of Minecraft really doesn't lend itself to traditional industry tools like blender. Um But thanks hopefully, an amazing community tool just kind of emerged as the standard here. Um
So this is uh block bench. It's made by a really talented creator named Yanni. Um Everybody that makes Minecraft content uses block bench. 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 Yans and ask how we can help. Uh And so we just partnered with him. Uh Block bench 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 Yannis on wizards to kind of get uh make it easier for entities, blocks and items to get built uh by even more earlier in the funnel creators. All right. So let's su summarize tooling here. Uh The community is a great resource and even without your help, passionate talented people are gonna find a way. Uh But there is definitely gonna 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 API S that we're doing and where can you accelerate areas? Uh Things like our, our partnership with block bench. All right, we're getting there. All right, the community bucket. Let's talk about the challenge here. So the, 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 uh 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 dot dev right here. Um They would fill them in, they would correct errors that we had in our own documentation. They build tutorials and guides on top of it. Um But they'd have no way of interacting with us. So if we change something in the documentation, they would just have to pull the latest and react to it. It was frustrating for them. Um And it really gave the impression that Mojang wasn't 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 add could be here. And in 2021 we launched our learning portal to centralize reference, documentation and learning material. Um open source in 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 uh communicate with us here. They commit um pull 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 continued 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 wanna 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 uh 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
attending 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 whilst behind experimental, we can let everybody play with it, but we don't promise any sort of backwards compatibility. Once we're all happy with the functionality of, of that feature, we can then remove it from the experimental toggle. And then we have that 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're 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 future requests, they vote on them, they had comments to them. Uh And all this directly impacts our backlog and the stuff that we work on. And well, 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. Uh 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, 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 the feedback and iterating in the open. Some examples of this are our creator API uh here, what we'll do is we'll release beta API S. 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 iteratively building up these graphics features, getting feedback on how they want us to data drive it. Um And on editor where they're giving feedback on what um workflows and tools, uh things that they
want next. 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 were just trying to follow uh in that, that tradition. Um So any feature that we're working on, uh I wanna get that public as soon as possible so I can build that out in the open. The last thing I wanna do is 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 And 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 never under under you never expected, 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 our 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 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 we 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 crater do more? Is their 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 crater because that next Great Crater could come from anywhere. Thank you. You all did good on the applause bit. That was good.
That was the most important uh agenda item. So kudos uh we still have plenty of time for questions. So if anybody has questions, I'm happy to take them. Uh So that's a good talk. So my question is uh is there any plan to support other popular uh coding languages like puzzle? Cause uh I allow uh most of the uh child they learn to uh coding impact uh in my graft with the book as developed by Peso. So and in pa 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. 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. Thank you.
Nice. Well, if that's it, then thank you all very much and have a great rest of your week.
