How Mojang Made Minecraft in Real Life

This is Minecraft, and this is Minecraft in real life. On October 18th, Minecraft opened up its first in-person event since Minecon in 2016. And we went to Dallas to explore everything about it, including going behind the scenes to see exactly how this experience is made, even down to looking at their Unreal Engine footage to see how it happens. And we're covering all of that, starting with what do you even do at this Minecraft experience? So first you spawn into this wooden area and you're chopping down all the trees. And there's a bunch of fun Easter eggs here. Like if you keep punching, And the way that that all happens is based off this orb of interaction, as they call it. And it's got LED panels all over it. But the way that it works is that on the inside, it's basically a phone. It's got wifi that connects it so that everywhere, you're constantly being watched throughout the experience. There's infrared cameras, it's knowing the position of everything. So when you're stepping on the apples to collect them in the first area, you're being tracked by everything all over this place. Saying it that way makes it seem a little creepier than it is. So if you want to break down the trees, if you want to open chests, if you want to beat up the tour guides, it's how you're going to do all of that inside of the experience. So when we went through the experience, we were then able to talk with Madeline about how they actually designed the set for this. If we had used, for example, the one meter scale, which is the accurate scale, right? Our trees, we wouldn't have been able to have as many details and as many elements in the experience. So with Martin from Mojang, we tried to find a happy medium between something where we could get a lot of detail that would still remain authentic to the scale of the game. So we started by really rough sketching, and then we actually built a model with wooden blocks, like very basic blocks. And Sarah and I spent a lot of time shifting things around in this big model. And we had a workshop in Montreal last year where Mojang came to Montreal to our offices. We literally played with blocks. And then as we were walking through again, we got to meet in our walkthrough Craig, who's from Mojang, who also pronounced it Mojang. So anyone who's ever called you out for pronouncing it Mojang instead of Mojang, right there from the Mojang mouth. I don't know. Craig was very nice. Craig got to tell us about what it's like to actually make sure that everything is being done to Minecraft quality, which as people who have done several Minecraft versus trailer videos, I can appreciate the level of detail that goes into it. And it's just fun to point out Easter eggs where they show up. Now, how they got the scale of everything is actually pretty interesting. So usually in Minecraft, everything is built to being one cubic meter. But if you did that, then everything would be way too tall. So what they decided, and this is actually the same for the movie, is that everything is made to 0.6 meters per block. And that's the official scale for Minecraft in real life going forward. Well, it's a good thing you guys cast Jason Momoa. He's probably the only person who can look big next to Minecraft. And then walking with Craig, we've got to walk over to the next room and see what was happening with the village here instead. Now, when we take all the wood that we've gathered from past rooms, we then use that to build together villages and different biomes. And what I thought was cool about this is that every different screen, you're seeing different animations pop up. Also a few, what I'm going to call Easter eggs as well. Things like some of the trees on the village screens that we're seeing here actually are built with fence posts for the logs instead of actual logs, which I got to say, that's a pretty cool build hack. And then after we've built enough of the places in our village, we're getting more food, which then allows us to breed more villagers, creating more love hearts. You know how it happens. I'm not going to explain the parrots and the bats to you. And then when everything's put together, our village population starts booming and that gets a couple of zombies to spawn while we're hanging around the village at night, starting a zombie siege. Which begs the big question, why did they pick villager rescue for the first experience? I mean, why not just beat the game for Minecraft? Well, for one, that would spoil some key moments, but as Craig and Olivier told us, it's also that this is a way more common experience for most Minecraft players. Since not everyone's gone to the end to beat the game, but a lot of people have been through a village, only to have all of their villagers turn into zombies when it gets too late. And that gives us our quest, folks. So when we were looking at the screens, we got to meet Emil, who was one of the designers that was working tireless nights behind the scenes to make sure the experience was working well, even working on it after the initial VIP party. So these kinds of screens you see here, they're basically cameras projected in these screens. So basically, from a viewpoint, it records and then projects on a screen, and we can take those screens and project them easily on the real MES panels. Wow. And then, going over to start our village quest, we go into this next room that they call Explore. And while we'll show you the Unreal Engine scene that they actually used to set this up, we first have to go and get all the things that we need. Starting with the sugar cane, which I first noticed was weird that it was four blocks tall, but it actually can generate like that in the base game. So the fact that it does that at first, I think that's fun. We break down the sugar cane, collect our mushrooms, and you notice all of this is getting tracked on this sign up here, which now that I see that here, it makes me want to be able to update it in-game with Redstone. I think having signs that update automatically would just be so cool. And then, after we collect all of that, you might feel a little disoriented as it starts to transition over into the tundra and everything slides down through here, which then puts us in the next area. You can go and get the snowballs. And if you look closely, you can see the snow golems are actually aiming at you depending on where you're standing in the room. And it's all thanks to the IR cameras that are looking above us. So they track your position and throw the snowball to your location. Very cool. And after we do all that, we get submerged through the bubbles down into the water section. And this is where we're next to an ocean monument. And we start to open up the treasure chests that we're finding down here for gold and diamonds. Parkster, let me show you over my chests. Not this one. Next, we were supposed to go into one of the holding areas, but because it was just us, we were given exclusive access to go behind the scenes and actually see how they're controlling the players inside of the Unreal Engine game. So with the space bar, we can... Oh, fun. Yeah. Of course, for the time... I can hear the blocks breaking in the other room as we're showing. So we can prototype, so... Of course, it's... So when you're like 20 person sitting in a room, so we have 20 characters in it. So we can prototype everything. You can look back here and see all the speakers for all the sounds. That's how we get the... When you're playing, you get the gameplay sounds come out of the speaker in front of you, because you can see them all lined up on the back here. So you have the small speakers for the sound effects, so it's at ear level. Oh, wow. And there's the overhead speakers, but everything is hidden, so you don't break the magic. So then we go into this area with the torches. And the reason they have holding areas like this is not only to build the atmosphere, but also if someone's taking longer in one of their parties, it gives them a way to make sure that there's not gonna be any cluttering. And then we mine through the door here, get ourselves into the mines to start to get the spider eyes that we need for the mented spider eyes, as well as the gunpowder to make the potion splash. Though I was more interested in the mine carts, but they give you the chance to just go and fight a bunch of mobs, which I think is very fun. And it was at this point in the experience, I was starting to realize that this is actually pretty exhausting, because you're shaking everything as you're going. That might just be me out of shape, but I think if they ever wanna do like a Minecraft fitness game, this seems like a good basis for it. Next, we've gotten everything that we need from the overworld, but now it's into the nether. So we take all the lava from here, go and pour it into the holes here, to then take the water to convert it into obsidian. And then we use the diamonds that we got from the water section to be able to mine it up and place it here to make it into the portal. Although you have to build it with the corners, which I gotta say is inefficient. Dude, now I'm gonna have, I'm just left with lava, silly. I do wanna ask, because in the times that we went through this, this seems to be the part where like, especially like people who aren't familiar with the game, it's the hardest for them to understand. So like, how did you, like, how do you balance like concepts like that? Because like, if you don't play the game, then this is like kind of a confusing thing. It's hard. Yeah. It's hard, but we were trying to create something that works both for people who knew the game and those that didn't. And I think this is great, because maybe they don't, parents don't understand here, or people who aren't as familiar with the game don't, they're a little confused at the moment, in the moment, right? Then they go home and have those conversations later, right? At the dinner table or, you know, after they leave, they're like, what was that that we did? And hopefully it introduces more people to the game because of that. Let's face it, if you don't solve the puzzle, nobody's gonna die. You're right. Next we walk through that, and then we have to go over, jumping across the lava. Yeah, I didn't make it in time, so I'm just gonna live here. And then using our snowballs, we can hit anywhere we want to knock all the enemies off. And this is definitely the part where it seemed like all players of all skill levels got really into it. Like everyone just loved this part. It's a fun little mini game. It feels like an arcade game, right? One of the Easter eggs that I'm pointing out is that when you hit the wither skeletons into the lava, they burn, which doesn't happen in the base game, just saying. But what also doesn't happen in the base game is the next boss fight that we have, because there's actually a giant blaze that comes out, which while I would have loved to see a nod to the wildfire, I get it because it would have been confusing to have to go back home and see a mob that's never been in your game before. Thank the mob vote for that, I guess. But then once we got all the blaze rods, we walked through here, and this is where we put everything together into a potion animation, which then after we brew it up, they throw out the potion and we cure all of the villagers, giving us our final achievements, and we beat the experience. And what's most interesting to me is that this is one of the rare pre-rendered areas of the actual course. Since everything else is running off of Unreal Engine across 24 different computers, but this was actually based off of an OBS window. We use OBS to film these videos. If it's good enough for Mojang, it's good enough for me. And one of the big questions I had after finishing that is what's next for Minecraft experience? And according to Olivier and Craig, what we didn't get to do here was a lot of building. So one of their ideas is actually to take this and make the experience so that we could use a giant block and maybe even learn how to build inside of the world like this. I'd love to see a build battle or something personally. And maybe even exploring like the deep dark and having to be quiet would be cool too. And as a way to explain complex mechanics to people who have never played Minecraft before, I think this works really well. I mean, I never would have thought the first experience for Minecraft would be based around teaching players from all ages how to actually go through and cure villagers. The brewing recipes alone could already be esoteric as is, so that's pretty neat. And if we could teach people things like redstone, that'd be even more helpful in my eyes. They could even partner it with things like Minecraft education and then take school field trips there. I don't know. I think there's a lot of capabilities here. And with that folks, YouTube thinks that you might like this video. So see if they're right and have a good one. All right.