Introducing INVERSE our next Minecraft Adventure

 INVERSE

Started working on INVERSE the next RGAP Creative Minecraft Studio's project, since Beta Testing is currently on hold waiting for a co-testor on the Washington Has Fallen Adventure.

INVERSE was conceptualized in 2021 during the introduction of the idea and discussion with several members of the Planet Minecraft Community and additionally in 2022. Originally the idea was to re-create a Minecraft version of the 1980's text adventure graphically of ZORK. Past attempts had been made by other Minecraft creators that failed miserably. However, when reviewing the requirements to create ZORK in Minecraft, I realized that all the coding techniques except one or two had already been designed and developed for the Washington Has Fallen adventure.

First few hours developing the first building in INVERSE

During the final work of 2022 on Washington Has Fallen, the missing requirements that would be needed for ZORK were developed for a mission in WHF, making it now possible to pursue that project.

Unfortunately, Microsoft now owns all of the Infocom games including all eleven of the ZORK releases, which means if developed for commercial releases as intended, it wouldn't be possible due to copyright.

INVERSE will feature an underground environment

ZORK 1 is believed to currently be in the public domain, but after consideration, I decided to develop an original Adventure called INVERSE which will utilized some of the same concepts found in ZORK, but with an original plot, story, characters and objective.

This will make it possible to offer the final version of INVERSE in the Minecraft Marketplace and hopefully help fund future projects.

Photos are from the first work of several hours. Working on the first infrastructure.

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We did it!

 Major Progress going into 2023

We did it!

We finished three years of coding and design work on the Washington Has Fallen Minecraft Adventure Project at 11:11 AM New years Eve!

This is an extremely major accomplishment. Now it moves into Beta Testing #3 to clean up, adjust timings, spot final bugs.

Currently Beta #3 is expected to be a two person team doing a play through, spotting bugs and testing for timing of events etc. Assuming nothing major appears that needs fixed, it could move rather quickly compared to the past three years of coding and design work.

Beta #4 is expected to be a team of four to five. Beta #4 is where issues and bugs might occur that could require some re-coding or code modifications based on our prior experience with beta test team #1. When you introduce multiple players into small and confined spaces and then have a lot of code doing various kinds of events behind the scene, Minecraft can become a bit temperamental, and do things like transport players into areas where we did the coding work or into other parts of the world.

It's a great way to begin a new year 2023.

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Thank you to the RGAP Creative community on Twitter

 Thank you Twitter Friends

2022 was a strange year, but also an amazing year for the Washington Has Fallen Minecraft Bedrock Adventure Game

Though we didn't have any takers from the public to help us beta test during 2022, we did have a very tiny, but active community of friends on the RGAP Creative twitter.

We appreciate your input, especially in our polls to help use to decide which characters you wanted to encounter within the final version of Washington Has Fallen.

We gave you a lot of suggestions, but you decided, and you wanted Elon Musk, Hunter Biden and Kyle Rittenhouse and a few others, and we think you made a great decision.  We had a lot of fun creating new missions utilizing this new Non-Player Characters into the game, in fact the only reason we're even still working on the game during the last week of 2022, is because some of the new missions we built are so stupidly crazy and fun.

In the last few missions of the game, you'll now encounter Kyle Rittenhouse armed with medical assistance and tools you'll need to help survive in the massive war that takes place in the Dark Lair.

Then you'll encounter Elon Musk with his Twitter Files.  Elon will send you into a very, very, very, very bad place where you'll encounter one of the craziest mission battles we came up for the game.  You'll have to locate Biden Hunter in this bad, bad, bad, more bad place and help him, so he will give you access to the information on his laptop.

Survive those encounters and maybe, just maybe, you'll live to tell about it.

So it is with great appreciation that we say thank you Twitter Friends, for your input.  The game would be completely different if you had picked different characters in our polls.  We don't even know how different, because we designed the final missions completely based on your choices and then had to figure out how they tied into the entire plot-line.

Thanks a bunch!

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Washington Has Fallen End of Summer 2022 Update

 Still slowly working out those beta bugs.

Progress on Washington Has Fallen continues, albeit slowly. Minecraft has received a lot of updates since we began coding the Washington Has Fallen adventure, and some of them have changed the way parts of the game was originally coded.

We originally used a strategy throughout the world that forced key NPC characters to self propel themselves over distances while triggering events along the way to set up some of the missions players would encounter next.

It was a unique idea in which an action by a player would TP the unknown and hidden NPC Character to a special area onto a pressure plate which in turn would trigger a series of command block commands, along with moving the NPC to its next area until the player arrived.

Originally it worked, because in the first introduction of NPC's into the Bedrock version of Minecraft, they had weight and could trigger a pressure plate when they landed on them.  But in newer updates of Minecraft, the player has to be present where the NPC is being teleported from, so it became no longer to self-teleport the NPC that had been teleported beyond the block limits of the player.  The command blocks would return an error, "Unable to place block outside of world".

That has created a ton of extra work as we were design the missions of the game impacted by the changes.

One way it's good, because originally we were teleporting and triggering blocks every so many block chunks within the players range. Since that it no longer working either, were now just teleporting the NPC's wherever they are going, and recoding the local activity locally.

Another good thing about it, is some in-between missions required a lot of running around and searching for buildings in Washington DC which is massive.  That created a lull in the adventure experience. So we've been forced to create new areas that originally didn't exist and some mini-missions that didn't originally exists.

The downside however, is its creating a whole lot of new unexpected work, a whole lot of new coding, and going through the original coding to figure out what we originally did and how it originally worked so we can write new code and make some aspects simpler.

For example.  In the original final beta version, the player trigger an action that sent the NPC jumping by itself and triggering different set-ups about four times on it's way to the White House.  That way, by the time the player would reach the White House, everything would be ready to go and the NPC would be in place.

But, with the changes Minecraft has made, we've had to instead make seven new mini-missions in between the location the player ends the previous mission before reaching the White House Mission which is a major mission in the game.

For example, the player originally never needed to visit the Hospital in Washington DC.  Now the player has three new missions before reaching the Hospital.  The Hospital never had a "Chapel".  But we needed an area that made sense within the overall game to propel the game forward, so we had to build this Hospital Chapel.

We thought the Chapel would be enough, but when testing it out, it connected to the original NPC jumping points which no longer work.  So several of the areas we built recently ended up being unused.  Instead as we beta tested this part of the progression of the game this morning, we realized the Hospital Chapel is actually going to end up being an important part of moving the game forward.

Of course I can write about it all I want, but it won't make much sense until you eventually have a chance to play, and by that time, we'll have already worked out the new coding.

That being said, it's exciting to finally be almost to the White House.  The White House Mission is one of the major missions and contains enormous amounts of coding and activity.  It's one those parts in the game for those of us doing the coding that lets us know we've reached a good place.

Though we'll certainly have to do more creative work arounds once we get past the White House Mission, its a good place.  Hopefully, the White House mission will require little if any new revisions.  It's been beta tested more than any other mission, only uses NPC's to trigger local events and is self contained.

We'll be about half way done with the current beta test repairs and fixing bugs when the White House mission is done.

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Q: How long does it take

Q: How long does it take to develop and design a #Minecraft adventure like #WashingtonHasFallen?

A: So far two years, and that is having started with the #LifeBoat #WashingtonDC as a template to save time. Add two years if you design all buildings.

Bottom line is, it partly depends on a lot of different factors. Washington Has Fallen encompasses multiple large missions with complex coding.  When the project began, SkyThrusters the project creator had only been playing Minecraft for about five months so he had to research, study and teach himself coding in Redstone, which is the most basic version of Minecraft coding.

The first version of the Washington Has Fallen adventure was coded entirely in Redstone, using Redstone machines and contraptions.  This kind of coding is ok for mini-games and if you are building in vanilla Minecraft in native survival game mode.  However it is problematic for bigger projects, because Redstone machines require complicated coding and massive amounts of space.

By the time the main storyline, new infrastructure, an missions has been completed, SkyThrusters had taught himself the advanced coding using command blocks and command codes.  This was a breakthrough, because it reduced the time required to code a mission by 95%, and similarly reduced the space required for coding to around 90%, when compared to Redstone coding alone.

Fortunately, by the time the majority of the core coding began, SkyThursters had already moved the coding to using command blocks and command codes. That makes repairing bugs much easier, because if something is not working as programmed, it is usually a piece of bad code.

Command codes also make it easy to reset a mission or event after it has been played, but requires a lot of forethought compared to RedStone coding.  Redstone coding has the advantage, that it almost always includes a switch or more that start the event. Because Redstone machines are "Hard wired", as long as no dispensers are involved that require being refilled, it resets itself.  Where as, a command block machine needs a command block switch that begins the event, and then resets itself after a certain amount of time.  That can be tricky, depending on how complex the machine is, but command blocks make it possible to create complex machines much easier and in a tiny amount of space.

During the current and final beta testing of the Washington Has Fallen, Minecraft adventure, when we have to go in to fix a bug, we're also reviewing and inspecting its necessity by asking the following questions. 

• Is this event still needed?
• Can we change the way it was originally coded to make it work better?
• Does it still make sense in the storyline?
• Do we need to add more coding and additional features?
• Does this part of the mission flow well, or do we need to add in hints or NPC guides to provide more information about what is expected?
• Are there any final design changes to the buildings or mission that will improve its appearance?

As of May 15, 2022 we just completed "final" beta testing of Mission four and five.

Mission one, had minor redesigns but no new features.

Mission two, had no redesigns and no new coding because it is so simple.

Mission three, consists of four different sections, but only had minor redesign and minor recoding.

Mission four, is one of the entirely original world areas that didn't exist in Life Boat's Washington DC template.  It is one of the larger and more complex coding projects, consists of eight different sections. It received some major redesign, new coding, new features during it's final beta testing.

Mission Five we finished final beta testing early this morning. Similar to Mission four, Mission Five occurs in the US Capital, so it is quite large and expands over four floors of the building. This mission required significant recoding to make the sequence of events flow smoothly and reduce the error ratio. Some of the coding in Mission five uses timers to trigger events. Its largest mission features has to perform a bunch of events sequentially in a matter of seconds or the player gets killed and that particular mission gets messed up.  It's only been tested with a single player so far, and we learned during the original live team beta test that having multiple players doing missions together, often creates unintended events, especially when they occur in small spaces.  So it's possible, this mission may need to be revisited more in the future.  

There are still a whole lot more missions to test and fix.  How many?  That is a great question, because when we were designing Washington Has Fallen, we didn't have a set amount of missions in mind, just the story line.  So no one has counted yet.  We're actually counting as we do the final beta test.  A mission often contains five to six self contained missions. We're only counting the entire mission, since its basically like reading the chapter of a book, and sequintial.

For example, if I break down Mission three into the "tasks" or mini-missions required to finish it, it contains at least twenty different stages.

One problem is finding Minecraft players who want to test it, but even more so, is finding Minecraft players who will actually tell us the bugs they encounter. Most just want to try it out and get a basic idea of the adventure or try to look at the coding.  No one wants to actually contribute to helping use find the problems, so that means we are having to do the play through tests and then debug too.  Chances are high, we're only catching the big bugs.  The big bugs are the most important bugs, because they break the flow of the game and prevent moving forward to the next mission.  We built the adventure so it progresses. Most of the missions are locked until you finish the previous mission.  Some of the missions can be explored externally, which ultimately could mess up one or two of them that are dependent of moveable objects. It's possible that those may end up being fixed now that we moved to command coding events.

Check back later for more updates. 

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