Tetrascape Content Packs as Minecraft Partner

During my time at Tetrascape, through my aid, the company was able to move from developing Skin Packs into also developing Resource and Behaviour packs.

Tetrascape is an official Microsoft and Mojang partner, meaning that it got commissioned by either company to create the content that we did for seasonal events, besides our own creative initiatives.

Development

I initially did work as developer on projects. I mostly had creative freedom, though I was constrained around the design requirements.

  • Creating Textures for blocks, items and entities (1534 files total per pack)
  • Prototyping behaviour for minigames using JSON and Commands
  • Keeping turnaround for my own work as short as possible

Of these [Slime!] was done almost entirely independent, safe for a couple of item textures. That was the first pack, which meant I had a little more stylistic freedom as I would have later.

Leadership

As the Team grew, I was put in a team lead position. This switched between Creative and Technical lead based on the project challenges. For these roles, I was put in charge of:

  • Recruiting and/or Onboarding of new members.
  • Allocating resources and delegation of workers.
  • Prototyping and iterating upon art styles or technical features.
  • Clearing blockers:
    • Technical issues requiring analysis (e.g. framerates, crashes)
    • Revision work
  • Organising and conducting meetings:
    • Weekly Sprint Meetings
    • Performance Reviews
    • Post-Mortems on projects

Together with the team, to improve Developer Experience, we called the leads “Wizards”. This quirk later made me casually introduce myself as “Digital Setup Wizard” at some conferences.