I worked on Minecraft for 3 years, before I quit to start my own game studio. Today we released our first-person puzzle game. AMA!

Congratulations for Minecraft and Lake Ridden.

I have a few questions that comes to my mind : 1) Was Herobrine ever a thing ? 2) How many years did you studies to become a creative/game creator ? 3) When did the project of Lake Ridden began ?

Thank you for doing this AMA !

1: No comment! :)

2: I studied programming (including games) in high school. Then I studied primarily game programming, but including some design, for three years of University. And then I learned a lot while working at Mojang. The thing is, you never stop learning new things. Like directing voice actors or help to master the sounds which I have never done before this project. :)

3: We started January, two years ago. So a maybe 28 months or so. :)

First of all congratulations for your new game. I want to know how someone should start when it's come to creating their own game, if they have idea for the game and basic knowledge of programming? What other skills are required (other than coading) to make a fully functional game?

When it comes to skills, I find that it usually comes down to design, programming, art, and sound. But each game has a slider for each of those and some even have a story which is a hidden fifth category. I know of very few developers who are good everything so I always recommend teaming up with someone else.

When it comes to making the actual game, I think you should just start by making a simple part of the game. Something that is entertaining by itself, like walking around and turning on lights like you do in our game (a small part of the finished product). :)

Nice! Welcome to Reddit.

Firstly, what is a day in the life of a “creative director”? That's awesome.

And do you ever miss your previous job, working on Minecraft? Is it a completely different experience?

Glad to be here! My job is similar to a movie director in that I'm responsible for the vision of the project. Now, in addition to that, I also code and solve a lot of our technical issues. When working on Lake Ridden, I have directed voice actors, designed core game mechanics and been a general problem fixer. Today, I have played our whole game all the way through, twice, making sure it works exactly like it is supposed to. I fixed a few issues and helped our art team prioritize what they needed to do today. My core responsibility is to complete experience from Lake Ridden, to make sure that design, art and sound work great together. :)

It is very different to working on Minecraft in many ways. Even when I started working on that, the core design was already set and we just kept moving Minecraft in that direction. We were also able to get a lot more feedback during the development which makes releasing a lot scarier. :)

Why do you look so sad?

This has just been a very long day/week/three or four months getting the game out. I'm really very happy. Sara, our producer, CEO, or whatever she calls herself says that I'm one of the happiest people she knows! :)

What were the most difficult design decisions you had to make during the development of Lake Ridden and how did your decisions turn out once implemented in the game?

The most difficult design decision I had to make during the development was to basically change the whole game. Originally, Lake Ridden started out as more of a horror game mixed with puzzles.

When we let people try it out, it turned out that our target audience didn't like the horror part one bit. So we had to redesign most of the game (with less than a year left in production), including rewriting all the story and creating new locations. We also made the puzzles a lot harder. I think that in the end, this created a far superior game! :)

What did you do at mojang? And do you have an accomplishments from the Minecraft game you helped achieve during the creation process?

I mostly worked on Minecraft Pocket Edition (before it turned into the bedrock edition) between version 0.4.0 to 0.11.0. I can't remember any specific thing I made but I helped the mobile version get a lot closer in features to the pc-version. We were a very small team. Wait, there is always beetroots! Maybe not the most impactful thing I added but my personal favorite.

Congrats, this looks like quite the exceptional game and experience!

Any chance on releasing on other platforms, such as the Nintendo Switch?

Thanks! We are not planning to release on Nintendo Switch for Lake Ridden but hopefully our next game! :)

How do you stay focused on a project for so long without losing motivation? Is there a process you go about structuring your project as to not overwhelm yourself?

It is really, really difficult. For our game, we have been working on all the parts of the game at the same time so we had something playable fairly early. On the days when you really don't want to think about the game, you just pick up one of the bugs that are spread out across the project, preferably with something different than you worked on yesterday. :)

Another thing we did with Lake Ridden was to design it in islands. Areas with their own personality and then we just needed to make the glue to piece them all together. Most of that glue is what we have been working on these last few months and now it is finally done! :)

How did you get into Game dev? PS. Played Ridden at EGX and loved it, looking forward to getting passed the demo!

I have always liked technical things, although I had a bit of trouble wrapping my head around programming initially. But when it finally clicked for me, I was in awe that things actually worked. I am secretly still always surprised when things work like I want them to! :)

I then studied game development for several years, mostly just loving to make cool games. :)