Gemperience is a Minecraft mod made together with my Significant Other that was made to improve the mining experience in the game. But it slowly evolved into much more, adding custom structures, whole new crafting mechanics and so much more!
I love playing Minecraft, but have always felt that the game rarely focused on what makes it great: Mining.
The design proved successful, people loved grinding their gems for loot and rewards, My wonderful partner helped out in the design aspects that were more foreign to me to keep the mod cohesive
Ever since I turned the ripe old age of 4, Java had been on my 'bucket list' of languages to try. After a (failed) attempt at applied computer science, I felt I had enough knowledge to start out.
To make a mod, you need to know the base game (or modloader's) API, I watched a lot of Kaupenjoe's tutorials on how to do simple things (e.g. Implement ore generation or what have you) And work on it further on my own.
Minecraft's hefty codebase can become a nightmare to work with at times. Porting the mod in its state & size became unsustainable. Due to this, the mod has stopped being supported for many versions.
Following another artist's pen
I was more an 'Art Director' in this project, my wonderful partner provided her pixelart skills and I directed what some blocks looked like.
The way that our teamwork was structured turned out to be a wonderful combination of speed, iteration and delivery. While I did most of the checks on if a texture would look nice, she would ofter iterate or redo some textures to make sure the mod looked great no matter what stage of development it was in!
Gemperience was and IS one of my proudest achievements, the level of technical knowledge and skills attained from this endeavor was more than worth it in my books!
Questions, offers or something you wish to tell me? Go ahead!